Comment by vintagedave
4 years ago
Could you share more about this please?
Some quick reading of SearxNG's docs* and testing out an instance** shows some very good search results.
> If you run your own instance, it's better to share that instance with friends or family so they can dilute your search queries with theirs, and it makes it much harder for your instance to be tracked the same as they'd track you. Or, you can use a public instance which is better for privacy, but worse for security and customizability.
Is there no way to clear all state after each query, or every 24 hours, etc? I'd wonder if sharing with family just means you'd build a closer data association with them. Or, what kind of things do you find important to customise (and why?) that aren't configured by public SearxNG instances?
Well all Searx does is act as a single-request-in, multiple-requests-out proxy. Whatever you search on it, you search on those same sites, just from the IP address of the Searx instance. They will assume your Searx instance is a person, and build a profile of its searches. Eventually, if you're the only one using it, and someone is able to link your search history on your Searx instance to your history on that same engine from before you used Searx, they have an uninterrupted search history / profile built on you.
Building a profile of one person using queries from multiple people is difficult, and it gives you plausible deniability if it's ever brought against you in some accusation.
So I guess I'm not entirely sure what you mean by clear state. If you mean clear state on the instance side of things, the point is that it doesn't really keep any state unless you want it to. The problem is the state that is stored on the search engine side of things.
The more people in your instance of choice, the more anonymous you become. But since you're not the one running the public instances, you don't have the power to tweak all the settings you may want to. There are plenty of public instances that have great defaults though, but you're ultimately trusting that instance owner to not log your queries as well. So make sure it's a trustworthy-enough instance. Or use multiple instances, as a counter to that.
Ultimately, even the worst-configured public Searx instance I've used in the past, was much better than using any mainstream search engine directly. The most important settings are which engines you want to pull results from. Most public instances don't let you set all of those, if I remember correctly. So being able to choose those may or may not be important to you. Again, some public instances have pretty good search engine settings.