this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
103 points (100.0% liked)
technology
24350 readers
283 users here now
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
- Ways to run Microsoft/Adobe and more on Linux
- The Ultimate FOSS Guide For Android
- Great libre software on Windows
- Hey you, the lib still using Chrome. Read this post!
Rules:
- 1. Obviously abide by the sitewide code of conduct. Bigotry will be met with an immediate ban
- 2. This community is about technology. Offtopic is permitted as long as it is kept in the comment sections
- 3. Although this is not /c/libre, FOSS related posting is tolerated, and even welcome in the case of effort posts
- 4. We believe technology should be liberating. As such, avoid promoting proprietary and/or bourgeois technology
- 5. Explanatory posts to correct the potential mistakes a comrade made in a post of their own are allowed, as long as they remain respectful
- 6. No crypto (Bitcoin, NFT, etc.) speculation, unless it is purely informative and not too cringe
- 7. Absolutely no tech bro shit. If you have a good opinion of Silicon Valley billionaires please manifest yourself so we can ban you.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Came here to say this but you beat me to it. So instead I will second the Searx suggestion.
Searx (technically now a newer development called Searxng) will grab results for you from just about any other search engine but it goes a long way towards anonymizing you to those search engines and helps break their ability to fingerprint and track you, removes ads, etc. If you use invidious for youtube (you should!) or nitter for "x" (xcancel is a nitter instance), then Searxng is kinda like that but can also aggregate all the search engines for any search you do.
You can host your own private instance which I'm told is easy, or you can use public instances, which I do. I do have to admit that a lot of the public instances get rate limited a lot, so you might get a few "0 results returned" before it works, if you have it set to use for example google and bing when both have rate limited that public instance. You can set it to use other engines at that point or try other public instances. Usually it works fine "out of the box" but sometimes it does take a little tweaking to get it the way you want. Mostly this is because search engines don't like people using searx and try to thwart it because it ruins their raison d'etre: tracking you and advertising at you. But that's what makes it all the more worth it. And if you set up your own private instance, then it greatly reduces or eliminates many of the issues that the high volume public instances have to deal with like rate limiting, and of course gives you full control over how you want your personal instance to work.
And yes, !bangs work on it, but you should use two exclamation marks instead of one, like "!!w beanis" to search wikipedia for beanis. Dorking more or less works to the extent that it works on whatever the target search engine is. If you're using searx to search on an engine that doesn't recognize boolean search operators, then it's not going to return results as if the operators do work. But it will work when set to search on engines that do recognize them.
Setup is indeed very easy, I run a local-only instance on my PC at home. Been a while since I did it but from memory I think it's just a docker one-liner. You are right that rate limiting can be an issue and that's part of the reason I spun up my own.