A metasearch engine effectively keeps you anonymous by doing the remote searching of other search engines and resources, and returning the results to you. Searx is certainly one of the more configurable and user friendly ones to use.
Each search result is given as a direct link to the respective site, rather than a tracked redirect link as used by Google. In addition, when available, these direct links are accompanied by "cached" and/or "proxied" links that allow viewing results pages without actually visiting the sites in question. The "cached" links point to saved versions of a page on archive.org, while the "proxied" links allow viewing the current live page via a searx-based web proxy. Across all categories, searx can fetch search results from about 82 different engines. This includes major search engines and site-specific searches like Bing, Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and Yandex. Any user may run their own instance of searx, which can be done to maximize privacy, to avoid congestion on public instances, to preserve customized settings even if browser cookies are cleared, to allow auditing of the source code being run, etc.
Currently there are around 116 public instances of searx running in different countries. It’s only big downside right now is there does not appear to be a way of doing a regional search just inside a country eg. for a shopping item you are looking for locally but I see an issue has been logged a while back so hopefully they address that. Filtering on language does no longer equal a single country for search.
See existing public instances at Searx instances
#technology #opensource #privacy
Online and offline Searx instances