Comment on LibreY vs SearXNG, which one do you suggest and why?
unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
I don’t think it makes sense to self-host these services, unless you plan to open it up for everyone.
Hm, I would think users could get good value out grouping search subject and selecting the best engines for their need, and receive a good spread of results from a single search.
…also, our upcoming swarm of personal AI’s might benefit from such a selfhosted search service.
The main goal of these projects (SearxNG, Piped, Invidious, Nitter…) is to make it way harder to track users by having thousands of users make requests from one single place. If you host this service just for yourself… you’d get the same tracking as using the service itself.
Self-hosting just for yourself damages the community a bit because your data will not be used to confuse Google and the other guys.
That’s a goal, but it’s hardly the only goal.
My goal is to get a synthesis of search results across multiple engines while eliminating tracking URLs and other garbage. In short it’s a better UX.fir me first and foremost. Privacy (through elimination of cookies and browser fingerprinting) is just a convenient side effect.
And it’s absolutely false to say you get the same effect. Intermediating my access to those search engines means things like cookies and fingerprinting cannot be used to link my search history to my browsing activity.
Furthermore, in my case I host SearX on a VPS that’s independent of my broadband connection which means even IP can’t be used to correlate my activity.
Probably stupid question: let’s say I selfhost searxng only for myself: google & Co can track all my searches, but doesn’t they pair all the data to the IP of my server? And because of this, they will not be able to show personalized ads to me, using my laptop. Is this wrong?
If the public IP is same, they can serve the same ads.
tubbadu@lemmy.kde.social 4 months ago
Why? The public instances are heavily overloaded, isn’t a private instance faster?
anamethatisnt@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Many use SearXNG to get less personalized search and tracking. If hundreds of users appear as one user for the search engine then both tracking and personalization of the results suffer.