SearX. Most privacy respectful search engine

Searx is a free metasearch engine, with the aim of protecting the privacy of its users. Not is real IP addresses or search history with the search engines from which it gathers results. Tracking cookies served by the search engines are blocked, preventing user-profiling-based results modification. By default, searx queries are submitted via HTTP POST, to prevent users’ query keywords from appearing in webserver logs. Searx was inspired by the Seeks project, though it does not implement Seeks’ peer-to-peer user-sourced results ranking.

Each search result is given as a direct link to the respective site, rather than a tracked redirect link as used by Google. In addition, when available, these direct links are accompanied by “cached” and/or “proxied” links that allow viewing results pages without actually visiting the sites in question. The “cached” links point to saved versions of a page on archive.org, while the “proxied” links allow viewing the current live page via a searx-based web proxy. In addition to the general search, the engine also features tabs to search within specific domains: files, images, IT, maps, music, news, science, social media, and videos.

There are many public user-run searx instances, some of which are available as Tor hidden services.

Installation

Update OS first!

To avoid unwanted side effects, update your OS before installing searx.

The following will install a setup as shown in Architecture. First you need to get a clone. The clone is only needed for the installation procedure and some maintenance tasks (alternatively you can create your own fork).

If you install from root, take into account that the scripts are creating a searx, filtron and morty user. In the installation procedure these new created users do need read access to the clone of searx, which is not the case if you clone into a folder below /root.

cd ~/Downloads
git clone https://github.com/searx/searx searx
cd searx

This install searx as described in Step by step installation.

sudo -H ./utils/searx.sh install all

Install filtron reverse proxy

sudo -H ./utils/filtron.sh install all

Install result proxy

sudo -H ./utils/morty.sh install all

If all services are running fine, you can add it to your HTTP server:

Install with apache

Install with nginx

About script’s installation options have a look at chapter Tooling box setup. How to brand your instance see chapter Global Settings. To stash your instance’s setup, git stash your clone’s git://Makefile and git://.config.sh file.