Host your own private search engine with SearXNG

Introduction#

SearXNG, put in its own words, is a 'free internet metasearch engine'. Note that it describes itself as a metasearch engine specifically - unlike your traditional search engine like Google or Bing, SearXNG does things a little bit differently: It aggregrates the results produced by search services like those aforementioned, and feeds them back to you.

Because of this key detail and a great deal of effort by those who've helped shape it, SearXNG protects your privacy, and does so very well:

• Private data from requests going to the search services it aggregrates results from is removed
• It does not forward anything to any third parties through search services
• Private data is also removed from requests going to the results pages

Furthermore, SearXNG can be configured to use Tor.

However, the aspect of privacy isn't the only great selling feature of the engine; from my use of the engine so far, it's also great at...searching (is that a surprise?). The fact that it's a metasearch engine plays a key role in this, as it provides SearXNG the ability to pull content more efficiently and gives you the ability to further tailor your experience.

Setting up SearXNG#

Installing the service#

As you may have expected if you've used NixOS for a while, searxng is packaged and has a service on NixOS. This makes setting it up just that much easier.

To get started, place somewhere in your system config the following:

{
    # ...
    services.searx = {
    enable = true;
      settings = {
        server = {
          port = 8888;
          bind_address = "127.0.0.1";
          secret_key = "@SEARX_SECRET_KEY@";
          base_url = "https://search.devraza.duckdns.org/"; # replace with wherever you want to host yours
        };
      };
    };
    # ...
}

The snippet above starts the searx systemd service for listening on port 8888, and assumes a base_url of https://search.devraza.duckdns.org.

Now that we've got the actual searx instance running, we can now set up a reverse proxy allowing the service to be accessed remotely (whether this is within your local network or across the internet is up to you).

Setting up a reverse proxy#

What is a reverse proxy?#

Before I get started with the technical details of setting this up, I'd like to briefly clarify what a reverse proxy exactly is (to my understanding).

Let's get the wikipedia definition of reverse proxy out of the way first:

[...] a reverse proxy is an application that sits in front of back-end applications and forwards client requests to those applications. [...]

However, you might be confused as to what this actually means; I'll give an example of the usage of reverse proxies to better explain this:

• Suppose you've got a few services running on a server (for demonstration purposes, let's name these x, y and z), each running on their own unique port.
• Assuming you had a domain, and wanted to access all of these services from their own unique sub-domains (e.g. x.yourdomain.com, y.yourdomain.com and z.yourdomain.com), you would have to use a reverse proxy.
• This reverse proxy would take in requests from clients going to sub-domains, and forward these requests to the appropriate port on your machine for the service being requested.

The concept should be clear now, if it wasn't already.

Using NGINX to set up the reverse proxy#

NGINX is a popular web server that supports the creation of virtual hosts and the usage of reverse proxies. To accomodate our searx instance, we append the following to our NixOS server configuration:

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{
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  # ...
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  services.nginx = {
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    enable = true;
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    # any extra configuration here
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    virtualHosts = {
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      "search" = { # this can be anything, being an arbitrary identifier
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        forceSSL = true;
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        serverName = "search.yourdomain.com"; # replace this with whatever you're serving from
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        # SearX proxy
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        locations."/" = {
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          proxyPass = "http://${toString config.services.searx.settings.server.bind_address}:${toString config.services.searx.settings.server.port}";
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          proxyWebsockets = true;
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          recommendedProxySettings = true;
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        };
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      };
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    };
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  };
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  # ...
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}

Note

The expression highlighted above is used to dynamically adjust the location NGINX will forward requests to, depending on your searx config

After saving your changes and rebuilding your server's system configuration (as usual), you should have a working private instance of SearXNG that you can access using the serverName you've given it.

Set your browser to use this as your search engine using the relevant documentation (with Firefox this is as easy as right-clicking on the URL after opening up the page and clicking a button). Enjoy!