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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by BonkTheAnnoyed@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

The instances that give the best results seem to also get throttled pretty often on the source search engines, to the point of near uselessness.

Thinking of hosting my own, but the maintenance seems pretty involved according to the docs.

What's your experience been like?

Edit: all right y'all, thanks for the feedback. I'm going to spin up an instance.

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[-] cosmicrose@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 1 week ago

I host it as a docker container and the maintenance has been painless

[-] mbirth@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago

Same here. Once in a while I update the config with all the changed engines. But that’s about it.

[-] root@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Self hosting and the maintenance is painless, but the results have been pretty terrible lately

[-] some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Is it still worth it though? Nice username btw lel

[-] root@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Lol, thanks. I think it’s still worth it if you want more ownership over your searches, but just expect some rough edges

[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago
[-] root@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Recently I’ll often get results that aren’t at all related to what I searched for. I also get a lot of timeouts from the upstream search engines, and sometimes I get results that are in Chinese for some reason

[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

Interesting.

[-] irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I deployed it in a Docker container. It is my default search engine. I use it constantly. Besides Calibre & Navidrome, it's one of my most heavily used, selfhosted apps.

[-] fccview@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Hey, I know you got a ton of replies but yeah, been using searXNG with a custom theme made by me and it's basically identical to google (including the feeling lucky part lol)

Used it for months and it's awesome, haven't missed google at all.

The amazing thing about it is that with an instance of meilisearch I was able to index all my media libraries/book libraries/game libraries and searching for !home <query> actually sarches within my home lab, which is a huge win for me.

Hope this helps give you an idea of how powerful this can be <3

[-] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

I just have it running in a docker container...

[-] zeitverschreib@freundica.de 1 points 1 week ago

@BonkTheAnnoyed SearXNG has been my main search engine for about three years now, running on a local Yunohost.

Almost no maintenance.

[-] suzune@ani.social 1 points 1 week ago

Yes. I selfhost it. It's pretty easy. All you need to know is that you occasionally need to merge your config with the original that is getting updated.

If you know how to use nvim diff mode, it's trivial.

[-] deleted@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

I wish we have a free to use, open source, and privacy respecting search engine that do the crawling and indexing and don’t rely on other search engines.

Maybe we can utilize all selfhosted instances to do the crawling and consolidate it.

[-] liliumstar@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago

I host and use it as my default search on all devices. Bare metal deployment. The maintenance is pretty low, I just run the instance update script from to time.

Results have been worse lately, I think it needs some tuning in regards to weights and what engines are in use.

[-] gravitas@pie.gravitywell.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

Pretty easy to maintain, ive switched over to using my instance as a default search provider and works great. 

[-] desmosthenes@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

I keep breaking mine but I dig it overall

[-] KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I’m running SearxNG as rootless docker container on my homelab for nearly 2 years now. I have connected it to Internet via VPN.

this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
30 points (100.0% liked)

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