Question about self-hosting in regards of privacy (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by Vexz@feddit.de to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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People always say it's the best in regards of privacy to self-host your own search engine. So I started doing that a while ago. But there's one thing I'm concerned about in regards of privacy when you self-host your own search engine.

Does it make any sense to self-host your search engine at home? See, I have a NAS with Docker. Inside Docker I ran instances of SearXNG and Whoogle. These search engines are just proxies for public search engines like Google. This means if I use my self-hosted search engine to search something, the search engine does the search and delivers the results to me. So for example SearXNG uses my public IP to search something on (for example) Google. That can't be better than using a public instance of SearXNG, Whoogle, LibreX and whatnot, right? So the best thing you can do is to rent a server in some cloud and host your private search engine there.

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[-] shortwavesurfer@monero.town 6 points 1 year ago

Correct. Best to rent a vps, host it their and let others use it too in order to hide which searches are yours

[-] bluetoque@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

I have the same concern, with regards to the IP address. However, my experience with the shared SearxNG instances is they are often throttled by the engines. So it's a trade-off. What about using a VPN?

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago

It will still help against browser finger-printing and other such stuff, but yes the benefit is limited if it runs on the same connection.

[-] appel@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Would it be an option to route your self-hosted SearXNG container through a self-hosted open VPN container?

[-] Vexz@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for that hint. It might be possible to route all traffic of a docker container through a vpn connection. This way you could make SearXNG (or any other self hosted search engine in Docker) use a remote VPN server and make it prompt the searches. See here.

this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023

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