I host my own SearXNG via docker compose, reverse proxied it via Traefik, added a few security headers, restricted access to my country to help prevent abuse.

Use it daily, the only complaint I really have is it occasionally doesn’t search when you type in the address bar of a browser. What I mean is I’ll type a search query and instead of redirecting to the query (searx.yourdomain.tld/search?q=test) it’ll just redirect to the homepage of my SearXNG instance (searx.yourdomain.tld) forcing me to retype my query. Annoying but not the end of the world.

Hey, I know you got a ton of replies but yeah, been using searXNG with a custom theme made by me and it’s basically identical to google (including the feeling lucky part lol)

Used it for months and it’s awesome, haven’t missed google at all.

The amazing thing about it is that with an instance of meilisearch I was able to index all my media libraries/book libraries/game libraries and searching for !home <query> actually sarches within my home lab, which is a huge win for me.

Hope this helps give you an idea of how powerful this can be <3

Yes. I selfhost it. It’s pretty easy. All you need to know is that you occasionally need to merge your config with the original that is getting updated.

If you know how to use nvim diff mode, it’s trivial.

I’ve been running my own, it’s mostly automated now. I started a yacy instance as well so not only am I aggregating bigger websites, I’m including the sites I crawled myself and the other sites available on yacy through it’s huge p2p search functionality. In this little way, I’m trying to make sure my search isn’t totally dominated by corporate search.

Tbh, yacy is 1000x harder to keep running than searxng.

I tried it couple of months ago for a couple of weeks straight, but as someone who searches in multiple languages it just didnt do the job very well. I looked up multiple guides and tried to configure it to my best ability but the results just were not great. For search now I’m completely addicted to Kagi, by far the most polished and best results.

I will give it a try in the future when i acquire a GPU for AI, I will then pair SearXNG with OpenWebUI, think that will be a fun project!

I have it running on a vps and what maintenance really?

Pretty easy to maintain, ive switched over to using my instance as a default search provider and works great.

I wish we have a free to use, open source, and privacy respecting search engine that do the crawling and indexing and don’t rely on other search engines.

Maybe we can utilize all selfhosted instances to do the crawling and consolidate it.

i been hosting my instance for a while its not on the main list but its still publicly accesible never had a issue with it

I’m running SearxNG as rootless docker container on my homelab for nearly 2 years now. I have connected it to Internet via VPN.

@BonkTheAnnoyed SearXNG has been my main search engine for about three years now, running on a local Yunohost.

Almost no maintenance.

I have it installed as a docker container on a server on my home network, and use it as my default search on my home machines, and access it on mobile through wireguard.

I have been hosting multiple SearXNG instances, the newest one (https://マリウス.com/be-your-own-privacy-respecting-google-bing-brave/) being a private instance for my own community channel, and it has been relatively smooth sailing.

Some niche engines, like e.g. Mojeek seem to be notoriously slow, but that might also depend very much on the VPS that your requests are coming from.

If, however, big engines like Bing or Google are blocking/throttling you, it might be due to your IP/subnet reputation and it might be worth switching your host.

Alternatively, you could overengineer a setup in which you round-robin route your SearXNG request through a number of simultaneously running Wireguard tunnels from a VPN provider to obscure your traffic.

However, if my experience, most VPN providers suffer extremely from Cloudflare and ReCaptcha blocks, hence ymmv.

Its not that difficult, i have mine set up with gluetun and I’ve been using for more than 1 year now, sometimes i have some problem with the search terms and every engine gets broken but i just need to search with another name

I have deployed it using docker. But I am still having trouble setting it up with cloudflare and my domain.