For #1 theoretically yes they could likely also censor results. This would mean they modified/forked searxng to do so since as far as I know there is no “feature” implemented that lets the admin modify search results beyond configuring which search engines are queried.

For #2 I’m not sure what oracle’s free tier looks like but I guess if it’s free you could give it a shot. I’d say you probably want a VM with at least 1GB of ram and then limit the searxng container to 512MB of ram in docker. 1GB might be tight with the other services that run with it like redis and a reverse proxy like Caddy or NGINX, but could probably be done. I’m using a 2 core 4GB RAM instance and it has plenty of headroom that allows me to self host other small services.This small implementation is obviously sized to be used on a small scale that maybe you and your family and friends use privately, a more public instance would obviously require more resources.

Well that’s annoying. I edited the comment above and for some reason Lemmy says it was deleted :/

Why not use Firefox for a privacy browser?

Fair point. Because I don’t have control over my information when directly utilizing a service that I do not own. I don’t trust DDG or any search engine to honor their commitments. In the specific case of DDG they are basically a proxy for Microsoft ad syndication and any of the tracking that comes along with that.

Also back to why I prefer searxng over any single search engine. If one engine decides to censor results, chances are all of them have not and searxng will combine results from all of them so it helps mitigate censorship.

My decision to use searxng while is in part due to DDG being in bed with Microsoft, ultimately it’s due to the entire search engine ecosystem being sketchy.

docker stats --no-stream
CONTAINER ID   NAME               CPU %     MEM USAGE / LIMIT    MEM %     NET I/O           BLOCK I/O         PIDS
dd2a774ad1a6   lemmy_lemmy-ui_1   0.00%     42.5MiB / 3.82GiB    1.09%     418kB / 7.24MB    2.65MB / 0B       15
718629b5514f   lemmy_lemmy_1      0.03%     6.82MiB / 3.82GiB    0.17%     1.52MB / 1.48MB   864kB / 0B        5
0c944dccc1e1   lemmy_postfix_1    0.00%     4.762MiB / 3.82GiB   0.12%     3.74kB / 0B       0B / 762kB        7
7f939790561c   lemmy_postgres_1   0.00%     46.45MiB / 3.82GiB   1.19%     1.09MB / 1.44MB   24.6kB / 2.16MB   9
14c7db5ae7ec   lemmy_pictrs_1     0.08%     23.36MiB / 690MiB    3.39%     3.81kB / 0B       0B / 0B           13
3695b8a0b67a   caddy              0.00%     9.984MiB / 3.82GiB   0.26%     0B / 0B           34.1MB / 12.3kB   9
12c8bd7c1cdf   redis              0.21%     3.555MiB / 3.82GiB   0.09%     101kB / 78.8kB    7.06MB / 0B       5
f03c3298de46   searxng            0.01%     349.9MiB / 3.82GiB   8.94%     9.21MB / 3.82MB   61.4MB / 61.4kB   25

I guess it is the largest consumer of memory. Unfortunately I rebooted yesterday, while setting up lemmy I noticed there was a decent amount of OS security updates. Otherwise I probably would have had stats from like 6 months of uptime. I’ll keep an eye on it and see if it balloons.

I’m mobile for the holiday right now, I’m not 100% sure on utilization. But it’s running on a 2 core 4 GB Ubuntu machine along with Caddy and Redis. I also have a Lemmy instance on that same machine so Lemmy, Lemmy-UI, Postgres, and pictr all fit on that machine and work for my daily use.

I can get exact utilization later tonight.

Interesting, my instance has been rock solid. When did you give it a try?

No.

I run a private instance of searxng on a cloud provider. If you have the know how to run Docker or are looking for a reason to learn it’s a pretty painless setup.

Searxng is a meta search engine that aggregates results from a lot of different search engines. You have the ability to configure which search engines it will use. For example you can have it aggregate results from Google, bing, yahoo, brave, DDG, startpage, and quant. You have a layer of abstraction between you and those services providing you extra privacy.

You can run an instance on your laptop/desktop and access it locally which gives ok privacy and protects from JS and other browser level tracking. Problem is your IP can still be correlated to others in the same network who use google or w/e. Also makes accessing from your phone and other devices a bit more difficult especially outside of your LAN as you’ll need to poke a hole through your firewall and use Dynamic DNS for reliable access while mobile.

Another option with better privacy is to run the instance in a public cloud provider like AWS, digital ocean, Linode, etc. This way Google, bing, yahoo, and other search engines just see the IP of your cloud instance making requests. It also makes mobile access easier since your instance will have a static IP that you can assign a DNS name to.

In both cases you can use Caddy as a reverse proxy to serve as the public endpoint. Caddy allows you to easily set up TLS/HTTPS without paying for a certificate.

https://github.com/searxng/searxng