Beyond DuckDuckGo: Introducing SearXNG, the Ultimate Privacy-Focused Meta Engine

SearXNG is an open-source meta search engine that prioritizes privacy and provides a free search experience. By not collecting user personal information or tracking search queries, it offers a safe and anonymous searching environment. Therefore, for those who want to obtain rich information while considering privacy, SearXNG is an ideal choice. It protects privacy during browsing and ensures a secure environment where personal information is not leaked to third parties.

In this article, we'll introduce the features and benefits of SearXNG in detail and explain why privacy-focused searching is important. Additionally, we'll explain how to set up and use SearXNG to help users conduct safe and free internet searches.

Table of Contents:

1. What are the Features of SearXNG? A Comparison with Google and DuckDuckGo
2. Setting Up SearXNG (Self-Hosting)
3. Using SearXNG (Finding Existing Instances)
4. Customizing SearXNG

What are the Features of SearXNG?

SearXNG is a fork project of SearX developed by Adam Tauber. Based on the development philosophy that prioritizes privacy, SearXNG is a meta search engine that merges result sets from various search engines including Google.

More specifically, SearXNG adopts three methods to protect user privacy from search requests:

1. Removal of private data from requests sent to search services
2. Prevention of forwarding requests (including ads) to third-party search services
3. Removal of private data from requests sent to result pages

As a result, user requests are anonymized across all instances, and IP addresses are replaced with those of the instances. SearXNG also does not provide ads or tracking content, and hides search queries and referrer pages from websites included in search results.

Comparison with Google and DuckDuckGo

Google Vs. SearXNG

SearXNG and Google have significant differences in their operational policies and security approaches.

Firstly, Google collects search queries and personal information for advertising and user behavior tracking purposes, using them to display targeted ads. When using Google, your search history, accessed URLs, access times, and online purchase information are analyzed to determine your interests and needs, which are then utilized for ad targeting. You can view the analysis results from Google's My Ad Center.

In contrast, SearXNG is an open-source meta search engine that prioritizes user privacy. It does not collect user search queries or personal information, nor does it engage in tracking. Additionally, SearXNG's open-source nature allows its source code to be publicly accessible, enabling community oversight and improvement. Conversely, Google's source code is proprietary, and its operational methods and security measures are not transparent to external parties.

In summary, SearXNG aims to prioritize privacy and security, protecting user information, while Google prioritizes business interests and advertising revenue, utilizing user information for these purposes. Google's algorithms for determining interests and preferences are undisclosed, limiting users' understanding of the information collected and how it is obtained.

DuckDuckGo Vs. SearXNG

Both DuckDuckGo and SearXNG are privacy-focused products, but there are several differences in their operational policies and mechanisms.

Firstly, DuckDuckGo is operated by a for-profit American company. Some of its revenue comes from non-tracking ads displayed on search result pages, which do not collect or track personal information.

On the other hand, SearXNG is an open-source meta search engine that allows anyone to host their own instance. If setting up your own instance seems cumbersome, there are multiple instances of SearX available worldwide, each with policies and security measures that may meet your needs.

Secondly, there are differences in the mechanisms of the search engines. DuckDuckGo utilizes Bing as its search engine, crawling the web and returning relevant result sets for search queries. However, Bing's result sets may still have accuracy issues despite the introduction of Bing Copilot and its increasing user base. Conversely, SearXNG can retrieve search results from multiple search engines set by the user and merge them for display. This allows users to obtain data tailored to their needs, potentially providing a better user experience than DuckDuckGo.

In conclusion, while DuckDuckGo is a simple and user-friendly privacy-focused search engine, SearXNG offers more flexibility, allowing users to customize their search experience to suit their preferences.

Using SearXNG with Self-Hosting

SearXNG can be hosted on any server and customized according to your preferences. Since Docker images for SearXNG are distributed, you can start using it immediately with the following command if Docker is installed:

(Example below describes SearX, the parent of SearXNG)

export PORT=80
docker pull searx/searx
docker run --rm -d -v ${PWD}/searx:/etc/searx -p $PORT:8080 -e BASE_URL=http://localhost:$PORT/ searx/searx

For more details, please check Docker Installation - Searx Documentation.

If Docker is not available, you can manually install it using package managers like apt. However, make sure that the Python3 dependency is installed.

sudo -H apt-get install -y \
python3-dev python3-babel python3-venv \
uwsgi uwsgi-plugin-python3 \
git build-essential libxslt-dev zlib1g-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev \
shellcheck

For more details, refer to Step by step installation - Searx Documentation.

Using an Existing Instance of SearXNG

If you prefer not to set up your own instance, you can immediately use publicly available instances of SearXNG hosted by others. Here, we'll show you how to find instances of SearXNG using SearXNG instances.

Finding Instances with SearXNG Instance

https://searx.space/

SearXNG Instance is a web service that lists and displays online SearXNG instances. Using SearXNG Instance, you can find the optimal instance based on encryption strength, server location, and benchmark values for returning search results.

Additionally, if you require stronger security, you can search for SearXNG instances deployed on the Tor network by clicking "Online Tor" from the header.

However, to find the appropriate SearXNG instance, you need to consider the following:

Privacy Concerns:

When using publicly available SearXNG instances, your search traffic passes through the server hosting that instance. Since SearXNG is open-source and easily modifiable, server owners or administrators may modify the program to collect search queries and other information. If you have privacy concerns, it's important to host your own SearXNG instance or choose a trusted hosting provider.

Performance Issues:

Publicly available SearXNG instances may experience simultaneous usage by many users, leading to slower response times for searches. Particularly during peak times, resource constraints, or when the instance's location is far from your residence, search speeds may decrease.

Customizing SearXNG

Whether you're hosting it yourself or using someone else's instance, you can finely control the behavior of SearXNG. Here, we'll briefly introduce SearXNG configuration.

When accessing the SearXNG instance, click on "Detailed Settings" at the top right. From here, you can configure various settings for SearXNG. Note that all settings are stored in HTTP cookies.

• General: Configure default behaviors of the website (search languages, sources for suggestions, safe search, etc.).
• User Interface: Settings related to the UI of SearXNG (language, theme, display method of search results—e.g., presence of Infinite Scroll).
• Privacy: Configure privacy protection for websites displayed in search results. For example, in image searches, you can prevent exposure of your IP address to origin servers by requesting images through SearXNG as a proxy.
• Search Engines: Choose which search engines to include in result sets. Excluding bottlenecked search engines can improve response times.
• Special Queries: Set up SearXNG-specific queries that can be used on the search screen. For example, enabling the md5 plugin and searching for "md5 " will display the md5 hash value of that string in the search results.
• Cookies: SearXNG settings are stored in HTTP cookies. This tab allows you to check the state of these cookies. If you want to transfer settings to another instance, you can import the displayed cookie string into the destination instance to maintain the same settings.

Enhanced Security Measures

So far, we've discussed mitigating privacy risks through the use of SearXNG as a search engine. However, focusing solely on enhancing privacy through search engines does not guarantee a safe internet environment.

One significant risk is the potential leakage of personal information from phone numbers. Many online services require users to input phone numbers to uniquely identify individuals. By forcing users to input phone numbers during website registration, these services can prevent duplicate accounts and even query credit information agencies based on phone numbers.

Additionally, phone numbers are often used for purposes such as geo-blocking.

To mitigate these risks, SMSOnline provides free disposable phone numbers to users worldwide.

https://www.smsonline.cloud/

SMSOnline is an online service that shares disposable phone numbers from various locations worldwide, allowing users to view SMS messages received on each number through the web.

By using SMSOnline, there's no need to expose your real phone number online. SMSOnline continuously acquires phone numbers from over 20 countries, including Tier 1 countries like Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, the United States, and Germany, ensuring that over 100 numbers are online at all times. With easy access to international phone numbers, you can easily bypass geo-blocking via mobile phone number authentication. When used in conjunction with the browser extension introduced today, you can reduce your online activity footprint effectively.