It's interesting to reflect how much we've come to depend on tools like search engines in our daily lives, and I guess I
could be grateful to Google for making its centrality so stark when they introduced their AI Overviews - sometimes on
point, and quite often outlandishly wrong.
For a couple of months I switched to Duck Duck Go, hoping for a replacement which worked like I was used to. But it
did not hit the same, I looked around for more options, and found SearXNG. I'm impressed.
- My searches now hit several engines including Google, all of which might withdraw service at any time, and the results I get are an aggregation of what's returned.
- There's no AI Overview presented at all - great! The results feel much better - more like search from a few years ago.
- There's no ads. There's no ads. Glorious.
- Results come from a number of search engines, so it's somewhat more resilient, but I don't think of it as an entirely dependable long-term solution.
- If or when it breaks for some reason, or essential engines block access, I might have to find an alternative. Oh well.
- It doesn't try to innovate in UI, I guess it's "conservative" in that it presents as a fairly ordinary search engine.
- It's capable, it does the job, and it's far less annoying than Google had gotten.
- It's open source, so you can review its internals, run it yourself, and contribute fixes or extend with search providers.
I'm happy to have found it, even if it doesn't last forever - nothing does. It's the best alternative I found.
Using SearXNG
You don't have to run SearXNG yourself: there are public instances you can use listed at https://searx.space/
Running SearXNG
I'm running an instance myself, behind SSL and basic auth so it's All Mine and Only Just Mine, and it's working great.
Instructions at https://docs.searxng.org/ for the method that suits you. You don't really care how I run it :)
Why run a copy myself? I don't have to wonder who's running the instance I'm using, or what their privacy policy says,
or whether they might get bored of running it. My instance is private, so if I stop using it, I can turn it off.
Thoughts on organisational usage
For an organisation with a variety of internal systems, I think it has potential as an organisational search engine.
Imagine if your people could use a single search interface, and get results from both the internet at large and your
Sharepoint, wiki, or other systems. That seems like a great deal, even if it meant rolling your own plugin to support
whatever weird cheesy systems you needed to search.