In the past, I was looking into SearX, which is a privacy-respecting metasearch engine. But back then, it was not shipped in a Docker Container and my interest into self-hosting it was very low. Last week, I saw this video by SemperVideo in my subscription box, which showed the SearXNG project, and I had to try it immediately.
Installation
I set up the docker-compose.yml file and ran the container on my VPS. The resulting instance is reachable under https://suche.peterge.de/.
searxng:
container_name: searxng
image: searxng/searxng:latest
restart: unless-stopped
ports:
- 8080:8080
volumes:
- /srv/docker/searxng:/etc/searxng
environment:
- BASE_URL=https://suche.peterge.de
- INSTANCE_NAME=suche.peterge.dePay attention to the BASE_URL environment variable, otherwise your instance fails to download the correct CSS files (GitHub Discussion).
Add search engine in Firefox
Next, I searched on how to add this as a search engine in Firefox and found this question, which finally got it working for me by adding browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh in about:config.
Final thoughts
All in all, I really like the benefits from SearXNG on top of SearX. The design looks simpler, a mobile version is implemented, and the installation is much simpler (comparing to the non-docker version of SearX).
All differences are listed here.
Of course you can read more about the benefits of using SearX in the README, but all in all SearXNG is a fork, which aims to simplify the setup process, ships rolling releases more frequently but is not as privacy respecting as the SearX project.