Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I don't think it makes sense to self-host these services, unless you plan to open it up for everyone.
Why? The public instances are heavily overloaded, isn't a private instance faster?
Many use SearXNG to get less personalized search and tracking. If hundreds of users appear as one user for the search engine then both tracking and personalization of the results suffer.
Hm, I would think users could get good value out grouping search subject and selecting the best engines for their need, and receive a good spread of results from a single search.
..also, our upcoming swarm of personal AI's might benefit from such a selfhosted search service.
The main goal of these projects (SearxNG, Piped, Invidious, Nitter...) is to make it way harder to track users by having thousands of users make requests from one single place. If you host this service just for yourself... you'd get the same tracking as using the service itself.
Self-hosting just for yourself damages the community a bit because your data will not be used to confuse Google and the other guys.
That's a goal, but it's hardly the only goal.
My goal is to get a synthesis of search results across multiple engines while eliminating tracking URLs and other garbage. In short it's a better UX for me first and foremost, and self-hosting allows me to customize that experience and also own uptime/availability. Privacy (through elimination of cookies and browser fingerprinting) is just a convenient side effect.
That said, on the topic of privacy, it's absolutely false to say that by self-hosting you get the same effect as using the engines directly. Intermediating my access to those search engines means things like cookies and fingerprinting cannot be used to link my search history to my browsing activity.
Furthermore, in my case I host SearX on a VPS that's independent of my broadband connection which means even IP can't be used to correlate my activity.
Probably stupid question: let's say I selfhost searxng only for myself: google & Co can track all my searches, but doesn't they pair all the data to the IP of my server? And because of this, they will not be able to show personalized ads to me, using my laptop. Is this wrong?
If the public IP is same, they can serve the same ads.
And what if the server has a static IP address?
Doesn't matter. They can still serve you ads.
How is this possible? I mean, how can they connect the searches from the ip of the server with your laptop's ip?
If the public IP is same, they will only see that.
They only see your public IP address (ie your router), so all devices on the private side will appear to be the same source.
So, if your laptop and your server (and anyone else at the same location) are connected to the internet via the same router, then, you're the same source.