Doesn’t that apply to any search engine?
It’s not private though unless you host it on a VPS.
eneff@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
doodledup@lemmy.world 1 month ago
No. DDG and Mullvad are private search engines as they strip out your trackable metadata and don’t pass on your IP address. If you selfhost your own metasearch engine on your own network you’re not hiding any of that.
whysofurious@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
You are correct about the IP address (searxng uses the IP of the instance) but aren’t metadata stripped or am I reading this wrong? docs.searxng.org/own-instance.html#how-does-searx…
doodledup@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You’re correct that it strips out most of it. But time of search, content of search, IP, ISP and location is more than sufficient for tracking you and building a profile.
eneff@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
DDG and Mullvad are private search engines as they strip out your trackable metadata and don’t pass on your IP address.
Is that so? How do you know?
Imhotep@lemmy.world 1 month ago
How would a VPS make it private? honest question, I have a VPS I could use but I always figured it would be linked to one IP, and I would be the only one using it. Doesn’t make much difference compared to home
If I were to share it with a lot of people that would be different I suppose
doodledup@lemmy.world 1 month ago
A VPS is used by thousands of users. There is a good chance somebody else hosts a meta search engine aswell. You’re being anonymised by being one of many. It’s admittedly not as good as using DDG (much larger crowd) but definitely better than selfhosting at home.
twei@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
Huh? If your VPS is used by thousands of users you should check for malware. The underlying hypervisor may run lots of VMs from different clients, but your VPS with its own dedicated and publicly routed IP is only used by you (except for if you make your searx instance publicly accessible and list it on searx.space)
doodledup@lemmy.world 1 month ago
If you get a static IPv4 yes that’s true.