Privacy-respecting Metasearch Engine SearX/SearXNG Still Jailed by Microsoft
Yesterday marked one week since Techrights Article Search went public. What can be done about the waning Web? Where can one search what's left of the Web that's not slop and spam?
I personally use SearX, and have used it for years. The results aren't great, but on rare occasions when I need to search something it gets more or less (close enough) to what/where I need.
https://searx.space has an extensive list of SearX instances:
In Falkon, adding an instance to a search bar isn't hard. It just needs an input line such as https://search.rhscz.eu/search?q=%s (where %s is the query/string).
Not surprisingly, many of the top instances are European. Developed by Adam Tauber from Hungary, the software is written in Python and is licensed AGPL-3.0-or-later. Sadly it outsourced its code to a proprietary platform controlled by Microsoft. SearXNG, a fork of the project (since 2021, also GNU Affero General Public License), chose this Microsoft hosting even after Microsoft had taken over GitHub. The original project:
They missed an opportunity to "Delete GitHub".
The official site and code still sadly controlled by Microsoft. That suggests they're not so good at privacy. █