Comment on Smokey's Simple Guide To Search Engine Alternatives
TheDuckPrince@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I discovered searx via this post, currently I use startpage which is the only one that restiuses me results as similar as possible to google. Is it possible to get a similar result with Seraxng? because it seems to me that the results are always very strange, it returns sites that are often inconsistent or unfamiliar. To give an example, if I search for searx in google the first result is wikipedia and the fourth searx.space, while in searxng the results are different depending on the instance used. Thank you
Smokeydope@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yes it is absolutely possible to get similar results with searxng to start page, in fact some instances allow you to aggregate startpage results directly.
I found priv.au as an example of an instance that can directly aggregate startpage.
So the trick to the instance weirdness going on is that each instance has its own set of default engines set to aggregate from. For example one searxng instance may want to only aggregate google and bing, while another may want to aggregate only independent search engines that don’t use google or bing such as YaCy and Qwant.
Here’s what you can do about that: The secret to overcoming this and dialing in the search results you want is to realize you can actually configure each searxng instance to aggregate the engines you want while disabling the default ones you don’t. All searxng/searxng instances have a preferences menu usually a gear icon in the top right corner. Or you can go to searxng-example.com/preferences . Once in preferences go to the ‘engines’ section from there you can tick the engines you want to use.
Some instances save your settings as cookies, some instances save your settings as a sub URL for that instance. The priv.au instance I mentioned saves your settings as cookies.
Hope this helps.