Google search doesn’t respect your privacy. Many people prefer DuckDuckGo or Startpage as alternatives. But the source code of these engines are not open. How about a web search engine that you can audit and host yourself? We are talking of Searx, a open source, hackable metasearch engine.
Features
- Tracking free
- Supports multiple output formats: json, csv, opensearch/rss
- Opensearch support (you can set as default search engine)
- Configurable search engines/categories
- Different search languages
- Duckduckgo like !bang functionality with engine shortcuts
- Parallel queries – relatively fast
Installation
- Install required packages
$ sudo apt-get install git build-essential libxslt-dev python-dev python-virtualenv python-pybabel zlib1g-dev
- Install Searx
$ cd /usr/local $ sudo git clone https://github.com/asciimoo/searx.git $ sudo useradd searx -d /usr/local/searx $ sudo chown searx:searx -R /usr/local/searx
- Install dependencies in a virtualenv
$ sudo -u searx -i $ cd /usr/local/searx $ virtualenv searx-ve $ . ./searx-ve/bin/activate $ sudo pip install -r requirements.txt $ sudo python setup.py install
- Configure
$ sed -i -e "s/ultrasecretkey/`openssl rand -hex 16`/g" searx/settings.yml
- Edit searx/settings.yml if necessary
- Start Searx and visit
http://localhost:8888$ python searx/webapp.py
- If Searx works fine, disable debug
$ sed -i -e "s/debug : True/debug : False/g" searx/settings.yml
Note that you need uwsgi to run Searx as a daemon. For installation instructions, as well as to configure a web-server, visit Searx wiki.
To try out Sear on a publicly hosted site, visit https://searx.me/.
On GitHub: Searx