Selfhosting a search engine

Privacy and Security Discussions
1

I have started using SearXNG as my main search engine. It was easier than I first thought to set up, nevertheless hard as a newbie to docker. I used docker to set it up. I only needed to download the containers, and :spouting_whale: docker, then I could imitatively start browsing in localhost:8080.

At first it was really bad because there weren’t any favicons when searching. This made it hard to distinguish websites apart. Because of bad video coverage it took me really long before I finally found the solution in the documentations. I will pass this knowledge down to you now. Go to settings.yml in the searxng folder and add this into it:

search:
favicon_resolver: “duckduckgo”

This solved almost all my problems with SearXNG. It’s also probably better than most search engines as you can choose from which search indexes to pick from.

The only problem I have left is that I always have to restart the SearXNG container so it gets internet access. I believe it stems from me using a VPN and it can’t connect to it. I would love it if anyone has any idea to solve it. It isn’t a deal breaker but it’s quite annoying to have to use the terminal every time I want to search.

2

You can define networking settings within Docker itself. For this reason, I only use compose files, as opposed to docker run. See the documentation to better understand how it works: Networking | Docker Docs and use keyword internet searches to understand how you can route a vpn network within docker.

Hope this helps as it does get technical. You also have docker community support and vpn community support as well.