In addition to SearxNG, Librex is another authoritative metasearch engine I use. It is configurable in different ways and includes torrents.
Brave, Quant, Yandex, and Mojeek are other centralized engines that do not rely on Google or Bing TMK.
I also run Yacy.net instance which is decentralized and federated. I crawl the sites I want to include as do the other operators. It is good for non-authoritative searches for topics that might be suppressed in centralized search engines.
Not only for topics that are suppressed, but also topics that are very niche. I played around with yacy to crawl for documentation of mechanical switches for my project - keycomp.co. It is awesome that you can just put few websites that you want to crawl, even edit its robots.txt and collect all of the data you need. Only issue is that it is very easy to just run out of storage, and even if you have that problem under control, there is an issue with yacy randomly crashing.
How big would you say Yacy's resource hogging is nowadays? I was considering running an instance years ago but I was told horror stories of it using 4 gb of ram at minimum.
Yes it is RAM intensive but depends on usage. When my instance is not being used much, it is consuming 1GB. I haven't seen high usage and RAM spikes as I have not published my instance to the world to use.
The troubles start when you realise you also need to pipe this through a reputable vpn to get any real privacy. Noticeably more lag and unpredictable performance.
Think it had something to do with the vpn connection being up multiple days. Seemed to degrade over time
Have you tried Phind? I'm curious how you find the two (Metaphor and Phind). I'm debating dropping Phind, i weirdly prefer raw ChatGPT. Curious how Metaphor is
1. It sits in the "money for AI" fund from me. Ie it competes with ChatGPT. While it uses OpenAI in the background, i have not found it to be as complete and useful as ChatGPT directly. I did cancel ChatGPT for a couple months to try out Phind instead because Phind can search, and i find that missing from ChatGPT of course (at least until they have the module back). I'm on the pro plan of Phind, fwiw.
Hypothetically it could (maybe, i'm assuming) be as valuable for my ChatGPT use cases, but i found that i couldn't just give it the same input i'd give ChatGPT, as Phind would then search for an answer and come back with.. well, things from the internet which wasn't what i was wanting from that ChatGPT interface. I struggle to think of an example, though.. so hopefully this vague description is still of use hah.
2. Where Phind excels of course is digging answers out of the web, finding API solutions, wiring those results up into code, etc. However unfortunately this still seems a complex task. I do not find Phind to be accurate enough. It usually does a decent job at inferring the solution from the results, but it struggles with knowing library versions, context of the search results, etc.
I find myself using Phind primarily as a quick jumping off point for search results.. but i still often need to still search myself to figure out the actual code. So when i feel like i still need to search anyway, and that i feel i gave up ChatGPT for Phind (due to item #1), then it's just a tough position to justify Phind over CGPT for me.
For context usually i'm using and searching about Rust.
Fwiw i've still not decided one way or another. Though i'm definitely on the fence. Hope this vague and off the top of my head post helps a bit.
We see Phind as a superset of ChatGPT. For the problems where search results may not be relevant, it should still function as GPT-4. Do you see it performing worse in your use case?
As for mistaken library versions, we’re working on developing our own index as a long term fix. But in the meantime you should be able to tell it the proper version and it should work.
So our hope is that Phind is a complete ChatGPT replacement for devs. Soon we’ll be rolling out our own models alongside GPT-4 that will bring additional speed and quality improvements.
I’d be happy to chat further with you directly, my email is michael(at)phind.com
> We see Phind as a superset of ChatGPT. For the problems where search results may not be relevant, it should still function as GPT-4. Do you see it performing worse in your use case?
I did, but honestly i've not tried it in a while. I'll keep this in mind and try to give it a go again before i cancel/go back to CGPT.
> As for mistaken library versions, we’re working on developing our own index as a long term fix. But in the meantime you should be able to tell it the proper version and it should work.
That is true, i rarely give it my library versions. Though, i feel what's needed is frequently versions are ambiguous in results. In the case of something like Rust, i would take a search result, go to docs.rs/foo and see if those results exist in the lib. Usually that's the mismatched step, something i'm unsure if Phind is doing at all.
I'll try giving it versions more frequently, though.
Unrelated side note: i'd love if Phind had nothing user/pass auth or at the very least much longer valid logins. Using email on multiple devices is a bit annoying for me. For me (i use anonymous emails) it's all the downsides of auth, but plus email validation every time hah. Though this is not making me cancel or anything, i just had to login again and figured i'd vent my small annoyance :)
Gotcha, would love to hear once you do try it again.
Does it really kick you out every time you visit? Login sessions should last for at least two weeks. Do you have any privacy settings that might be interfering with our cookie?
Oh definitely not every time i visit, it's probably working as designed. It's just that across ~5 devices it feels frequent. Plus logging into other devices is made more difficult by this email-only option. Just my own personal gripe, it's probably unique to me haha.
I do, in so far as it usually reveals where Phind failed for me. Ie "Why does it think that method should exist? Oh, this search result has an unrelated library using that method - and it got confused" sort of thing.
Off the top of my head i think if the link is correct, Phind is correct.
It's a tough problem though. I suspect the difficulty lies in a lot of search results not containing the appropriate versions/etc at all. So you have to go to secondary/etc steps of looking up library APIs and knowing that the two are incompat.
Kagi allows you to provide custom CSS if you want to tweak it to your liking. I've used it to remove some of the widgets I don't personally find useful, and to replace some icons.
A common use case for maximized browser window - tab-bar on the left- or right-side of the browser, and websites set to zoom to more than 125+ % to read it comfortably ... With higher resolution and bigger screen monitors everything seems to be getting tinier and tinier on screen. :)
Yeah my browser and my terminal always share a 60/40 split on a basic 1080p monitor at work. I actually hate having it take full width now. Everything is condensed and is less strain on my eyes.
> What is the difference between searx and SearxNG?
> TL;DR: SearXNG is for users that want more features and bugs getting fixed quicker. If you prefer a minimalist software and stable experience, use searx.
> SearxNG is a fork of searx, created by a former maintainer of searx. The fork was created because the majority of the maintainers at the time did not find the new proposed features privacy respecting enough. The most significant issue is with engine metrics.
> Searx is built for privacy conscious users. It comes with a unique set of challenges. One of the problems we face is that users rather not report bugs, because they do not want to publicly share what engines they use or what search query triggered a problem. It is a challenge we accepted.
> The new metrics feature collects more information to make engine maintenance easier. We could have had better and more error reports to benefit searx maintainers. However, we believe that the users of searx must come first, not the software. We are willing to compromise on the lack of issue reports to avoid violating the privacy of users.
> Furthermore, SearxNG is under heavy refactoring and dependencies are constantly updated, even if it is unnecessary. It increases the risk of introducing regressions. In searx we strive for stability, rather than moving fast and breaking things.
From my understanding, the metrics from SearxNG are still privacy respecting, and searx never clearly defined what constitutes privacy enforcement or drew a clear line. Most active developers went to SearxNG for that reason, and searx was largely in maintenance mode for a long time. I had recently asked to clear the confusion, and honestly just made me think searx was passively abandoned already - they just made it official.
Maybe I'm biased because I'm a SearXNG maintainer, but I don't fully agree with the comparison done by SearX team.
Not reporting the problems in the engines do not benefit to the users, if nothing works why use SearX in the first place then? I would even say it's a major advantage to have the ability to quickly and easily report the issue, this way the users are all getting quick fixes as soon as something break.
We rely on unstable API or ways to extract the results from the engines, it doesn't make any sense to not have a system that allow to report the instabilities.
It is true that SearXNG code base change a lot faster than SearX one when it was still actively maintained, but that's because our users want to see the software evolve to new needs, and like I said above relying on unstable ways to extract the data require us to improve the software so that it still works with the engines we rely on.
A major feature we added is the new anti bot available on the public instances, it allows having public instances that work with almost all the engines instead of getting errors all over the place because bots were abusing the instance.
Encrypted proxy and Tor based search engines are popping up with solid masking technology. Torry.io is my preferred proxy over StartPage. StartPage proxy is operated by an adtech firm
I always thought that a capital X in the middle or end of word would be the greek letter Chi, which is pronounced like ch. So just "search". Problem with that of course is that nobody knows what you are talking about, because it looses all uniqueness from its name, which is why I never actually do it.
I think the intent is /sɝks/, rhymes with "lurks" /lɝrks/, with the r-colored vowel in General American, but perhaps the author speaks with a non-rhotic dialect.
But that makes it sound like something between "sex" "sacks" and "sucks", which is less flattering.
That is another one that was tougher a decade ago, but I have not heard anyone say “jiff” in a long time. I think the hard g has successfully won, at least in my world
I will say that the amount of people who I’ve met that say “ess cue ell” vs “sequel” has really declined in the last decade. I anecdotally feel like sequel is winning in a big way
Hmm those ar least have locals who ostensibly have a bit more authority on the matter that can be leaned on for backup than just your average layman’s pronunciation. Not so with “Ess cue ell” and “sequel” which feels like more of a free for all and cultural battle
Yep! I don’t actually know how to pronounce that but I would figure it out when I went there. I feel like if people from Germany want me to call it Doytschlond when I am there that is their prerogative and I should respect that ;)
Oftentimes though locals are like “just call it Sweden, we know you will butcher Sverige” or “just call it Finland, we know you will mess up Suomi”
It actually often confuses people when you are speaking in English and use the appropriate pronunciation for that language. Like it would throw someone off if I was in Sweden speaking English and said the Swedish way of saying Gothenburg instead (which, depending on where you are from in Sweden, can sound something like “YOT eh boy” with a silent or very soft G at the end)
Why willingly pronounce it the wrong way? You must be American, I've never heard any European saying MAdrid. Ew. Especially none proud to pronounce it the wrong way for no discernible reason.
There's a difference between using the name in its original language, or pronouncing it right in your own. Madrid is pronounced only one way, and guess what, the word is the same in English and Spanish.
In your case, it's like pronouncing Rome as Rom-EH, because it sounds cool to you.
Or you can justify your ignorance and inability to literally shift the stress one syllable over with any story you like, if you prefer.
I'm pretty sure people in New York calling it Neuva York soon get corrected, and soon correct themselves. You'd have a hard time living in Britain by being so stubbornly reluctant at learning the correct pronunciation of places.
Fortunately English is not prescriptive and people can pronounce things however we like. There’s a Salina ‘sulaina’ KS, yet there is Salinas ‘sulinuz’ CA.
In any case I’m not in Madrid and the people saying ‘nweva joR’ may not be in New York either.
And despite Erdogan’s pronouncements I’ll keep on saying Turkey.
This is the most American, "I have never left my country and I don't really care about other cultures because mine's more important" thing I've ever heard. Enjoy your bubble, dude.
When I go overseas, places where English is rare, people also don't pronounce American cities or towns in a very English way --some sound foreign-- ask a Chinese to give you the name of any major city in your country/province/state. It's going to be quote different. Why should I feel any different?
Brave, Quant, Yandex, and Mojeek are other centralized engines that do not rely on Google or Bing TMK.
I also run Yacy.net instance which is decentralized and federated. I crawl the sites I want to include as do the other operators. It is good for non-authoritative searches for topics that might be suppressed in centralized search engines.