Recommended SearXNG Instances

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1

Personally I really want to try SearXNG, but I’m a little intimidated with the task of verifying that the instance(s) I choose are a good choice for privacy and not malicious. I would really appreciate it if Privacy Guides chose a few instances to recommend and added them to the SearXNG recommendation page. I’m sure others would as well.

2

Its bit outside the scope of the project IMO. Instances can go down or get rate limited with some regularity so it would be a lot of work for PG to try to stay on top of every change…

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3

I’m sure the community could come up with some recommended instances, but as mentioned it is likely outside of the scope of PG. I use https://searx.be/ regularly

4

While it would be nice if this could happen, I don’t think it is really possible (or desirable). It is one of the fundamental limitations of SearX outside of the context of self hosting (which was the original intent of the project).

There are three reasons I can see why recommending specific instances is not ideal:

  1. SearX has always been primarily intended for self-hosting.
  2. Its hard to vet an instance and the person/people behind it, harder still to keep up with instances frequently coming and going. And in many cases not much of anything is known about an instance.
  3. These are almost all small individual hobby projects, or tiny not-for-profit projects, with limited resources, a recommendation can be a ‘kiss of death’ if too many people flock to that instance.

SearX is ideal if you are willing to run your own instance or trust someone who runs an instance, outside of that context, I think there is no way around doing your own due diligence and making an imperfect decision based on limited information (essentially you are trading the devil you know for a devil you don’t). For this reason I don’t tend to recommend SearX outside of the context of self-hosting.

I think a more practical and conservative approach would be to not officially recommend any instances and for the community to maybe have a running thread where people share the instances they use, and their reasons for placing trust in them. This would be more dynamic and less offical.

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5

It’s not comprehensive for searXNG instances, but searchengine.party is a useful resource for comparing aspects of different engines.

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