[email protected] wrote:
https://searx.me/about
I'm assuming that you wanted people to discuss this, hence you posted about it. I've participated elsewhere in this thread but I thought I'd try to more clearly explain my position on this to gain some clarity about how searx works.
I don't understand how the searx metasearch engine lives up to its claim of being "Tracking free"[1] or "privacy respecting"[2].
There's nothing inherently "tracking free" about using a metasearch engine. Quite the contrary, if one submits queries to multiple search engines from one's own computer (whether manually or through a program running on one's own computer), one now is being tracked by multiple search engines. Depending on the details, the metasearch engine and/or the dependent search engines can record time/datestamps, IP addresses, queries, and returned results at a minimum. So if your computer runs searx and searx contacts Google, Yahoo, and Bing on your behalf, those 3 search engines can record the aforementioned information. If this is how searx works, you'd be better off using just one of these search engines yourself in a typical way because then you wouldn't be directly handing information to the other search engines. In this case searx makes the privacy problem worse, not better, by spreading privacy-busting information to additional search engines.
If your computer runs searx and searx relays your request to a central searx server which then relays your query to 3 search engines from there, the central searx server can record the aforementioned information (even if it strips away anything identifiable before passing the query on to the subordinate search engines).
Either way, your privacy is not respected and your queries can be correlated by time, IP address, and possibly other data.
Unfortunately neither the link you gave nor the project's wiki are clear about how searx respects ones privacy. While searx claims that it "never shares anything with a third party"[3] it's not clear how this promise is kept. As a result, I'm not sure searx is any better than using a VPN plus a search engine that claims to not keep logs and not host its services on VMs which are hosted at privacy-busting providers (such as DuckDuckGo using Amazon.com's VMs). Startpage/Ixquick would appear to be the best of the lot here but unfortunately I can't verify if StartPage/Ixquick is lying in their claims because Startpage/Ixquick are essentially SASS. A free software SASS doesn't help here because the moment you submit your job to be run by another computer you have no control over what that computer does.
Does anyone have a clear description of how searx queries are routed to its search engine dependents in such a way that the user's information is not able to be kept?
Thanks. [1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx [2] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Contribution-Guide [3] https://searx.me/about
