Yeah? OK well it’s certainly worth taking a closer look at, and I was also doing some reading on Yacy. I’ve run one in the past called mnogosearch, with a lot of customization, but it would be nice to get into a community project like this.

But is it decentralized? Do the results from multiple spiders get added to give everyone the same quality searches or do I need to scan the whole internet myself?

[edit] I was looking at this earlier and couldn’t find the info. Started searching again just now and found it immediately… of course… (The answer is YES)

Yep, that’s exactly what I was looking at (https://github.com/searx/searx). As I said, it was a QUICK dive but the wording was enough to make me shy away from it. For all the years I’ve been running servers, I won’t put up anything that requires the latest/greatest of any code because that’s where about 90% of the zero-days seem to come from. Almost all the big ones I’ve seen in the last few years where things that made me panic until I realized that oh, if your updates are more than a year old then none of this affects you. And the one that DID affect me had already been updated through a security release.

I just did a quick dive into this and have some concerns. SearX appears to no longer be maintained and was last updated three years ago. SearXNG was forked to use more recent libraries but there were concerns that those are not always stable or fully vetted. There were also concerns that SearXNG did not follow the same concerns for user privacy. It’s a shame that SearX shut down, that one actually sounds like a project I would have jumped on.