I run my own instance (behind basic auth and some other stuff) and default my phone and personal boxes to it.
I fall back to DDG on work machines (no reason to even hypo risk exposing personal search hist to my corp IT folks) but otherwise I’ve little reason to use anything else.
Reverse phone search kind of sucks, but I can live with that.
None of the engines SXNG hits would meet my needs individually, but a quick skim of the well-ordered results (which by default note the source) generally gets me what i want in first page.
If not, it’s a cue that either my search terms are crap, or I need to narrow further.
Thanks for sharing. Is it a problem that you use is alone since someone supposedly could derive your identity from your search history? Often it is proposed to make a public but rate limited self hosted search.
Welcome to tech subs on lemmy.world, glad to have you with us. 🙂 I have given up on trying to interact with people here who are trying to educate the world but are misunderstanding something themselves; it is like holding back the ocean. I figured you deserved an answer though.
The github page for websurfx says its a open source alternative to searx, and I never used searx before so I wasn't aware of it being OSS but sorry for being your ocean of ignorance you can't do anything about. Next time I won't share anything to not offend.
Mine is selfhosted as well. I enabled many engines (Google, Bing, DDG, Yahoo, Naver, Qwant, Brave, a few more) and a single search query takes about 8 to 10 seconds. I have pretty fast internet connection, it would be great if I can make it faster lol. I'm using DDG when I need a quick search due to that.
I'm running it on my laptop, has skylake i5 ulv with 8 gigs of ddr3 and a tlc micron ssd with slackware linux installed (no docker, manual server config).
I'm using it, but it's far from perfect. Also sets itself to strict filtering, results aren't that great a lot of the time, of I go back the page errors and has to be reloaded, sometimes when searching from the address bar it just goes to the homepage with no search, image search isn't very good, sometimes it's just down and I have to change to a different server, not really any userscripts out there to make it better, and it's kind of ugly.
The best is you can just self host it too! Its simple and privacy respecting! The best part is you can search there on multiple sites at once! So you see results from every search engine you selected!
Standing my instance up was painless af. Docker blah blah, tweak my nginx, update dns, throw an autorenew LE cert in front of it, and that’s about the extent of it.
Sure ya could get more fancy but for my needs and single user env, that’s about all there is to it.
Your title connected a dot for me... I'm a dummy, I've been pronouncing it "seer X" and "seer X-N-G" in my head all this time when it must be "search" and "searching"... 😔