I’m one of those guys. Searx itself is just a meta search engine, using Google and many other search engines. You don’t need to dive into any rabbit hole, just use a pre existing server for easy access. From time to time I switch the instance. You can then still decide if you want go the full rabbit hole and host it yourself, but that is not a requirement. At least its fully open source and your data/search queries are not sent to Google or Microsoft. In the settings can be specified which engines you want to use:
Wait, it supports bangs? That’s the #1 thing that keeps me specifically with DDG, once i have some time i’ll have to explore this (probably not earlier than a couple weeks though)
I was used to the bangs in DuckDuckGo too, but stopped using them. In example I have duckduckgo search engine disabled here, but can still do a ddg only search with !ddg hello . But don’t get your hopes too high, because I think it only supports the few bangs and nothing else. It does not support ddg bangs. I registered a DuckDuckGo bang !retro to point to RetroPie forum, but it does not work in Searx.
Edit: It would have been a true banger if we could combine them in Searx like this: !ddg!retro
Alternative you may consider is the brave search. Supports many bangs (?all of what ddg supports). It is independent of other search engines as well. But its picture search is poor.
I’m one of those guys. Searx itself is just a meta search engine, using Google and many other search engines. You don’t need to dive into any rabbit hole, just use a pre existing server for easy access. From time to time I switch the instance. You can then still decide if you want go the full rabbit hole and host it yourself, but that is not a requirement. At least its fully open source and your data/search queries are not sent to Google or Microsoft. In the settings can be specified which engines you want to use:
Try it out here: https://searx.space/ and for some information about SearxNG: https://docs.searxng.org/
Thank you.
Wait, it supports bangs? That’s the #1 thing that keeps me specifically with DDG, once i have some time i’ll have to explore this (probably not earlier than a couple weeks though)
I was used to the bangs in DuckDuckGo too, but stopped using them. In example I have duckduckgo search engine disabled here, but can still do a ddg only search with
!ddg hello. But don’t get your hopes too high, because I think it only supports the few bangs and nothing else. It does not support ddg bangs. I registered a DuckDuckGo bang!retroto point to RetroPie forum, but it does not work in Searx.Edit: It would have been a true banger if we could combine them in Searx like this:
!ddg!retroThat combination works in Brave to search the forum (prefixing !ddg or !d) I’m surprised it doesn’t in Searx.
I’ve just tested this in Brave and it works. And it does not require the combination,
!retroon its own is enough. Nice!Alternative you may consider is the brave search. Supports many bangs (?all of what ddg supports). It is independent of other search engines as well. But its picture search is poor.
I’ve switched to this from DuckDuckGo right during the downtime and, so far, it’s been working out great.