In my last post on installing Whoogle, I went over why you would want to take control of your privacy from other search engine privacy proxies. Now Whoogle was a proxy for just Google, but enter in the SearX project and the forked project SearXNG. From their site:
SearXNG protects the privacy of its users in multiple ways regardless of the type of the instance (private, public). Removal of private data from search requests comes in three forms:
removal of private data from requests going to search services
not forwarding anything from a third party services through search services (e.g. advertisement)
removal of private data from requests going to the result pages
Removing private data means not sending cookies to external search engines and generating a random browser profile for every request. Thus, it does not matter if a public or private instance handles the request, because it is anonymized in both cases. IP addresses will be the IP of the instance. But SearXNG can be configured to use proxy or Tor. Result proxy is supported, too.
SearXNG does not serve ads or tracking content unlike most search services. So private data is not forwarded to third parties who might monetize it. Besides protecting users from search services, both referring page and search query are hidden from visited result pages.
To install SearXNG with docker:
docker run -d --name searxng -p 8080:8080 searxng/searxng
Now you can access SearXNG from ip:8080.
From here if you’re in Firefox, you can right click on the address bar and add the search engine. And you can go into settings and make it your default if you wish. If you’re on another browser or Firefox mobile you’ll need to manually set it up with the following:
http://ip:8080/search?q=%sIf you click the top right configuration gear, you can go into the engine page and enable/disable search engines as desired. I was getting errors with wikidata, possibly an API issue, so I disabled that one pending further review (not that I use it).
And then you’re ready to use your own private search engine privacy proxy only giving the search engines the IP and search terms. They also have Tor available if you need extra privacy as well as support of result proxy.
Unfortunately, there is no really usable opensource distributed search system ready for use. I have played with Yacy, but it wasn’t capable of replacing the established search engines quite yet. But at least with these search engine privacy proxies you can limit their ability to track and spy on you while eliminating the need to trust other third parties.