Do you understand how this is not helpful in any way now?

No, because you’re just talking about how much RAM SearXNG consumes. In your original post you were complaining about a memory leak. I monitor the ressources of my NAS. Even after a restart of my NAS where every container was freshly started the RAM consumption wasn’t higher than a month later after the restart (without restarting any of the docker containers). And that is why I can with full conviction tell that my SearXNG instance didn’t leak memory.

This discussion is going nowhere from here so I’m gonna stop responding. I said everything to make my point as clear as possible. Have a nice day.

Yes, because as I said it’s not a memory leak. I would have noticed a memory leak because I keep an eye on the ressources of my NAS (on which my SearXNG instance was hosted) and I didn’t notice an usual growing consumption of my RAM. I just didn’t check the consumption of RAM on each individual container that was running. I would have done that if I would have noticed an unusual consumption of RAM.

Look, I can’t give you more detailled information than this because it’s all from my memories. All I wanted to do was to help as good as I can by answering from my experiences. If that doesn’t help or is inappropriate to you I’m sorry. I didn’t want to offend you or anything like that.

Well yea, I tried this once. It didn’t eradicate all of the NSFW results, even on strict safe search mode. Anyway, I moved on. :)

I am/was serious, yes. These were my experiences of using SearXNG for over 1.5 years. The project is great but it has some big flaws. Maybe give Whoogle a try. It’s what I’m currently using.

the issue with SearX is the search results can be irrelevent or something random.

Haha, oh, right! I just remembered that often times when I searched something completely harmless some weird porn sites would appear in the results which had clearly absolutely nothing to do with the things I’ve been searching for. It’s one of the reasons why I stopped using SearX(NG).

Look at this thread to find some inspiration of what you can do to increase your online privacy.

While it was obvious they’d do this at least they say it out loud now.

I thought of a similar thread but I think the results would be pretty much the same. It’s great to have some mutual inspiration here.

Anyway, there’s tons of stuff I can list here. I’m gonna list some stuff but will probably forget 70% of the other stuff because it’s become so common in my daily life.

• Own NAS as private cloud
• Self-host on my NAS to not use internet services that spy on me (like Bitwarden, Joplin server, cryptgeon, Syncthing, Nextcloud)
• OPNsense as my router of choice
• W10Privacy (because I still can’t switch to Linux because of circumstances)
• Firefox as my browser of choice with some extra settings to harden it (I tried something like LibreWolf in the past but I can’t use Spotify without DRM)
• uBlock Origin of course (and some other browser addons like LibRedirect, ClearURLs, Decentraleyes and so on)
• Privacy respecting mail provider (mailbox.org)
• Signal (instead of WhatsApp)
• Thunderbird (instead of something like Outlook)
• Piped (instead of YouTube)
• Uninstalled/disabled all apps on my phone that I don’t need (also saves battery)
• Been using custom ROMs on my phone (but I made some bad experiences with stability so I stick with the stock ROM for now)
• NextDNS (with encrypted DNS)
• Whoogle (instead of Google)
• Lemmy (instead of reddit, haha)
• Avoid accounts (and even links) to something like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and so on
• Libreddit, Nitter and all the other privacy friendly frontends for social media
• Never connected devices to my LAN/Wi-Fi that don’t need an internet connection (like a stove lol) and never installed the apps on my phone to operate them

Gonna add some more to the list whenever something comes up in my mind. Like I said it’s become so basic in my life that I don’t always think about it anymore when I use it.

Btw things like 2FA only help with security, not privacy.

No, I didn’t check because it never got so big to the point where it would become suspicious to me that something might be wrong. Maybe it uses more RAM than other self-hosted search engines but it never leaked memory so it used more and more RAM the longer the instance ran. Just because it uses much RAM it doesn’t mean it’s leaking memory. It might just be developed badly, not very caring about your ressources.

None - I deleted it because I don’t use it anymore. It wasn’t much though and it never bloated, even when running for over a whole month.

Thanks for that hint. It might be possible to route all traffic of a docker container through a vpn connection. This way you could make SearXNG (or any other self hosted search engine in Docker) use a remote VPN server and make it prompt the searches. See here.

That’s weird, I never had memory leak problems.

I don’t like Whoogle because of their UI for image searches. Imo it’s really bad but that’s just my opinion. The image search is also the reason why I don’t use Brave Search because it redirects you to Google or Bing. What’s the point in being “a privacy respecting search engine” when you get redirected to Google and Bing which are the worst search engines in terms of privacy?

Been using a self hosted instance of SearXNG but recently went away from SearXNG in gerneral. Why? Search results more than often enough ended in timeouts from the search engines. It was frustrating and they never fixed it. In terms of privacy it’s top notch though.

Starpage was bought by an advertising company.

It’s fine but I wouldn’t judge if I had never tested it for a while. But whether you wanna give that search engine a chance or not is completely up to you ofc. :)

If you wanna know how it respects its user’s privacy you need to do some research as it’s a little complex. I don’t see where you get scammed just by using the search engine. It’s like you’re saying you got scammed by a car seller once so you’ll never make any other attempt to buy a car ever again.

In the meantime I got to understand why Kagi needs an account: It’s their business model. You have to pay to make searches that exceed the free 100 searches. So of course you need an account.

I see! Thanks for the clarification. I just checked their prices. Looks like you get X searches for a specific price. Not appealing to me but I bet many people are fine with that. I rather prefer a little bit of ads at the top of my search results (which I could block with an adblocker anytime) but that is just my personal preference.

How exactly am I the customer if they don’t track me? Do they display ads? How do they cover the costs for this search engine?

I’m not really understanding what you wanna tell me with “you are the customer”. They display ads at the top of your search results and that’s how they make money. Considering that, yes, you are the customer. But they don’t track you and your search queries are anonymized so they respect your privacy. With an adblocker you don’t even see the ads. You can make an account to earn PRE (the crypto currency they use) with your search queries. But you don’t need to do that. You could even run your own node server(s) and earn even more because you’re helping the search engine by being a part of the infrastructure. But you can ignore all that and just use the search engine.

Anyway I’m really satisfied with the search results. Didn’t even feel the need to switch to another search engine since I’ve started using it a few months ago.

Why? You can completely ignore that. Just use the search engine and ignore the rest. I’m really happy with the search results.

Mmh, looks like you need an account to use this search engine. Always not a good sign in terms of privacy but I might be wrong here. I’m currently using Presearch. It’s decentralized (like Lemmy) and anonymizes your search queries. Most of it is Open Source but they announced to make everything Open Source in the future.