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.

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Download Article PDF now with Express Checkout
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subscriptions
Digital Subscriptions

Related content

  • Search Engines

    If you are interested in data privacy, you might want to try an alternative search engine. We discuss a few search engines that serve up good results, along with an option for setting up your own search engine.

    more »
  • FOSS Metasearch Engines

    Alternative open source metasearch engines offer more privacy than mainstream search engines and can sometimes yield better results. While SearXNG is the best-known open source metasearch engine, 4get is a capable alternative worth checking out.

    more »
  • The sys admin's daily grind: Rclone

    Having a good backup is a matter of course for sys admin columnist Charly Kühnast, but devices could still fall victim to fire or theft some day. Because he has enough free space on Google Drive, he doesn't need to search long for a solution. The only thing missing is the right tool.

    more »
  • Introduction

    This month in Linux Voice.

    more »
  • Charly's Column – Reverse SSH Tunnel

    This month, Charly Kühnast draws attention to a widely unknown weather phenomenon: The instability of rarely used tunnels leading to a Raspberry Pi. Read on for greater insights.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Linux Mobile Programming Security Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source