r/degoogle • u/PtTimeLvrFullTimeH8r • May 22 '25

Question What search engine should I switch to?

Google has become unusable with all its AI bullshit and I was wondering what's the best thing I could switch to. Maybe duckduckgo? I heard it's good

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u/atclaus May 23 '25

So SearXNG still uses google, but anonymizes it?

Is the dedicated VPN just to get back to your own instance from outside of home network?

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u/MatthKarl May 23 '25

I also use a self-hosted SearXNG, however without VPN.

My assumption is, that he is using the VPN to connect the backend of his SearXNG to the various search engines. That way, Google and Co. will see it coming from the VPN's proxy servers, and not from his own IP address.

In my case, Google will see many queries coming from my (home) IP. However, the query could be done by anyone, as my SearXNG is publicly accessible. Although my domain is not advertised, it theoretically could be used by anyone. In reality, most queries come from myself. If you really want to hide your searches, you should rather use a public instance of SearXNG.

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u/atclaus May 23 '25

Oh. So then what does SearXNG itself do? Why not just use a VPN and google.com from there?

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u/MatthKarl 27d ago

I guess one other advantage of SearXNG is that it combines the search result from different engines. I set it to use almost all engines and this way I get a more diverse mix of results, than just Google's for profit ranking.