I don’t think we are interested in removing SearXNG at this time. There are plenty of advantages to using a search engine frontend like this that people might be interested in, including but not limited to:
- Aggregating search results from multiple providers gives you the most complete possible search results, some search engines are known to or are rumored to censor/demote various topics.
- Searx links directly to results, there’s no outbound link tracking to see exactly which result you visit.
- There are many different public providers, some of which are well known privacy activism organizations. Many people are likely to trust these providers over Google. Additionally, most large search engines are based in the United States, so this lets you trust a data provider in a specific jurisdiction if you wish. For example, EU citizens may prefer their data to remain in their home country or the EU.
Even self-hosting a private instance can provide some benefit. While your searches will be coming from a unique IP address, this is not any worse than directly connecting to the search provider, and the entire frontend code you’re visiting in your browser is code you trust and control.
I see a lot of pro-Google posters face this same confusion. Just because we are saying to not trust Google does not mean we’re saying you should trust everything that isn’t made by Google, don’t mix this up!
Avoiding tracking networks like Google and Facebook is specifically part of what we do here and is one of our common threat models, so recommending that people just use Google just because they’re big is a non-argument.