The sys admin's daily grind – Searx

Peppered with Hits

Article from Issue 194/2017
Author(s):

It goes against the economic rationale to assume that commercial search engines have the best interests of users at heart when it comes to data protection and use. Sys admin Charly has found an alternative.

Many Linux tools with low version numbers seem astonishingly mature and stable – and they are. Searx [1], which recently bounced up to 0.10.0, is definitely one of them. The developers describe it as "a privacy-respecting, hackable meta search engine." If you enter one or multiple search terms in the search box, Searx forwards the request to up to 70 online sources. The results show you the sources from which they originate.

You can individually sort the sources by topic or disable them, if needed. In the General field, you will find the major players: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Reddit. For images, the results come from 500px, Flickr, or Deviant Art. If you are looking for music, the program taps into Deezer, Google Play Music, Spotify, SoundCloud, or half a dozen Torrent sites. IT gives you GitHub, Stack Overflow, and the excellent Arch Linux Wiki.

The Science category may be quite thinly populated, but it has some jewels in the form of Wolfram Alpha, Google Scholar, and Microsoft Academic. Base (the "Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) specializes in searching for and within scientific work. For example, a quick query for "adenosine triphosphate" provides three times more hits than a Google science search on scholar.google.com. If you like, you can prioritize results from open access sources.

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