Was wondering what the hell was going on this morning.
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/
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
That combination works in Brave to search the forum (prefixing !ddg or !d) I’m surprised it doesn’t in Searx.