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Hey,

Some of you may know me for Jotty and Cr*nmaster, been quiet with my head down lately improving my apps and trying to build a searxng alternative for myself.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a70266bc-f67b-4dc1-b516-86166c8e4080.png

Whilst I have used searxng for about a year now, I have had quite a few personal gripes with it so in the past few weeks I have decided to make my take on it and ran it happily locally. Since publishing the beta to my discord server I ended up building a fairly extensive tool.

Degoog is actually pretty minimal, there’s no much to it aside from a very comprehensive plugin/extension system. The idea being users can create their own engines, themes and plugins that hook into the core application and do.. pretty much anything, from adding stuff to the result page (e.g. speedtests, tmdb information, ip retrieval, rss feeds embedded on the home page) to full on OIDC systems.

This is still very much in beta and I figured the best way to get it out of beta would be to publish it to a wider audience (currently some users in our discord server have been testing it fairly successfully and i’ve been on top of bug fixing).

Repo: https://github.com/fccview/degoog

Official extensions: https://github.com/fccview/fccview-degoog-extensions

Docs: https://fccview.github.io/degoog

You can install custom plugins/extensions. You can make your own repo and add it to the store page in the settings, or you can just have your own plugins locally for yourself.

Let me know what you think, and feel free to ask any questions and feel free to join our discord (link in releases page on any of my apps) for a more direct chat about things <3

I have used searxng for about a year now, I have had quite a few personal gripes

What gripes have you had? Curious. Maybe something I’ve overlooked.

I keep getting results in different languages, a lot of my engines get rejected, it’s quite heavy and building extensions for it is fairly complex. They also recently restructured their own codebase, which means most of my customisation didn’t work anymore, which is when I decided to build my own instead of re-making all the customisations from scratch.

This is again very personal issues and specific to my use case frankly, and it could be that I wasn’t doing customisations right, but the way my brain works is to make something from scratch and learn the ins and out of it, so I just went for it.

I guess it also is styled more to my linking (plus theming is very extensive) and I wanted to create something that slots things in if wanted (see tmdb above results and rss on the homepage)

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4ae054e3-d825-48f2-b3d2-cb22f845247e.png https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/417c7f0f-d01c-4988-a992-2348bade2720.png

I found it oddly good at finding hidden pages containing the exact terms I was looking for but horrible at more general stuff

My biggest issue with searxng is that google gets rejected all the time. But that’s because the instance gets rate limited, no? Do you deal with that more effectively somehow? Is it even possible?

Hey! Well, aside from rotating multiple user agents, have a cheeky retry and having a “retry” button next to each engine I also heavily cache results so that for 12 hours the same query will give you the same results from cache. You can always invalidate cache from the settings.

Another thing you can also do is add multiple proxy that rotate on each request, traffic goes through proxy urls and you don’t get hit with rate limiting (again, proxy settings are in the settings tab - you can find free ones around).

So far I haven’t been rate limited by google yet, not gonna claim it won’t happen as it probably will, it’s the nature of the tool, but finger crossed so far so good.

I host mine at home and only available on my tailnet. Haven’t had any rate limiting since.

Yes, I think that’s also key, the more people using the same instance the more likely it’ll be to get banned, but again, rotating proxy is key to this I suppose

Echoing what @thagoat@lemmy.dbzer0.com said, I selfhost it and I only have one user…me.

Why would Cron need to be censored?

lol it’s a play on the cron syntax, the * is a o in the name/logo

I’ve been mostly happy with SearXNG but customization is a pain point of it for sure, so this looks really promising. Definitely gonna be keeping an eye on this one

YES! Customisation is the main reason why I went out of my way to build it, and other stuff I listed in another comment in the thread :)

Thank you, if you ever end up making a store with your own plugins/themes and so on just lemme know and I’ll add it to the repo, it’d be cool to have a list of available stores already in the beta version, so when I go out of beta it’ll feel like a much more mature product <3

I can’t wait to try it out! I’m going to get it up and running today

Yaaas! Let me know how you get on with it ♥️

Just got it up and running! UI wise it’s super slick both on my phone and PC. It feels a lot better than searxng. My searxng instance also started getting blocked or something because my queries were failing, especially for images.

Are there any plugins or themes to checkout yet or is that ecosystem still developing? I’d love to know the process so I can take a whack at making a theme or plugin myself

Hey! If you go to settings -> store you will find all the plugins/themes/engines I made and use the docs/existing plugins as examples to make your own, I tried to build a variety of them to cover most aspects of customisations ♥️

Glad you like it! I saw you joined discord so feel free to ping me for more direct questions :)

So I put this on a server and have been messing about with it for an hour. I like it. Better than searx I think. I pointed nginx at it and I’ll use for a while. Thanks for all the hard work. Starred your repo also 😎

My searxng instance also started getting blocked or something because my queries were failing, especially for images.

your instance has been found by bots. turn on the limiter and link token, and that’ll stop. this is why most instances don’t work, is they don’t turn on the existing anti-bot measures.

https://docs.searxng.org/src/searx.botdetection.html

turn on the limiter and link token, and that’ll stop in SearXNG. this is why most instances don’t work, is they don’t turn on the existing anti-bot measures.

https://docs.searxng.org/src/searx.botdetection.html

looks amazing i will get it running today or tomorow to test it out

Thought this said dogdog when I scrolled by earlier today lololol

I would totally use a search engine called dogdog

DogDogStarp!

Ow that’s a big compliment, thank you! I think it’s just different rather than better as it focuses on user experience more than niche features. It’s meant to be an easy way to move out of using Google daily, without too much of a learning curve

Glad you are enjoying it ♥️

Nice! Thank you! Let me know how you get on! :)

I can see a dogdog theme about to happen 🤣

I used to use Dogpile a lot in the late 1990s. Coincidentally it was a similar idea to this and SearxNG - it was a meta search engine that combined Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, AltaVista and a few others into one interface (no Google since it wasn’t in widespread use yet).

Have you tried 4get.ca? Quite usable, if somewhat childish.

Also, the documentation link in the readme is wrong: contents of () and [] are swapped here

Why do these docs look like code? So odd.. For my dumb brain trying to absorb this from a phone, is there a doc for what to enable in the Docker container that I’m not seeing?

4get.ca

Oh that’s quite nice actually! Never seen it! Suppose it’s very minimal tho, I’ll do some market research to scope the competition lol I feel like more alternatives make a better internet, if you ask me :)

p.s. thank you! sorted out the readme, my bad

This is absolutely brilliant, well done! I’ll play around with it for a while. Was looking for a searx alternative as I keep getting no results and this I’d very timely! Awesome stuff!

SearX has been dead for a long time. SearXNG i s brilliant and has no problems. If you’re having problems, then it’s your server getting blocked. Not a problem with the application.

Thank you so much!! Let me know if you run into any issue, it’s fairly stable for a beta, but I’m sure there’s a ton of quirks that still need sorting ❤

I was an AltaVista-head back in the day

That looks amazing!

I don’t want to bother you about that or anything, but Microsoft (who owns GitHub) is a company that’s actively hostile towards open source devs and is actively using GitHub to scrape insane amounts of training data for their own AI models without regard for consent.

Have you considered moving to an alternative platform? Codeberg for example is quite good, all their code is open source and self histable and the interface is quite easy to understand for someone, who is used to GitHub. It’s also managed by a nonprofit. It’s also pretty easy to transfer you repo from GitHub to there.

You’re correct, it’s a searXNG public instance. Wasn’t self hosting but using various public instances with low success. After a few searches the engines stop replying. I’ll be using this self hosted one for now. Really looking promising.

Interesting. I like the idea of a search aggregator. I’m not super tech savvy, but I’d like to try this out. Is it possible to install this on iOS? Thanks in advance.

Why don’t you try self hosting SearXNG? Just curious

there’s some guides online on how to do it, you’ll need to edit some configs and also have a Redis docker up.

It’s only accessible over Tailscale

I 2nd this, Codeberg is basically an open source community funded GitHub clone

Nice, and interesting. I would reconsider the name though. Its hitting way too close to google. I know that was the intention, but I think you will be in google’s shadow because of it.

Thank you! I mean, I am not trying to compete with Google, maybe when I release out of beta I’ll let the community that’s slowly creating around it decide a new name, we’ll see ♥️ wouldn’t be the first time I do that with my apps :)

Hey thank you!

The issue with GitHub alternatives is the lack of runners/pipelines and restricting functionalities.

Gitlab is a good alternative but I use it for work and having two accounts juggling between work/personal projects is a recipe for disaster.

I spent a bit of time on codeberg and I am checking it out, happy to push the repo there too, but they don’t seem to provide pipeline options, so I wouldn’t be able to build the docker image there like I do on GitHub :)

Btw whilst I do believe into the whole Microsoft scraping projects to train AI regardless of licenses, I wouldn’t say they are hostile towards open source. They actually are extremely for it, vscode is free and one of the best IDEs out there for example, GitHub free plan is VERY generous and they have a whole FREE coding academy with extremely in-depth courses on how to learn programming and various niche topics. And they integrated wsl to seamlessly run Linux commands within windows, which I never thought I’d see happen (been there for years, but I’m just giving you examples).

Ahh definately not my problem after figuring this out (couldn’t find a guide but looked at the source). My instance is private so this isn’t impacting my non-Google results.

I think they have their own action system (https://codeberg.org/actions/meta), but I’ve never tried it. Maybe you can look into that?

My point about Microsoft was mainly because AI is harmful and often used in a hostile way against open source. Also the fact that Microsoft tries to own the whole free software ecosystem.

That would be awesome! Anyway good luck and have fun developing it, it’s interesting project 😊

Hi, this needs to be selfhosted in order for you to use it, it’s not an app :) You can definitely use it from IOS once you have it running tho

Boils down to not looking into it and being focused on other matters. This one seems quite straightforward and took five minutes to get it up.

First of all, thanks a ton.

I have been using SearxNG for more than year, running it as docker container on my Homelab. It’s connected to internet via Mullvad VPN.

Lately, I have see both Google and Bing search engines are either not working or returning complete garbage results.

My firewall setup doesn’t allow any incoming connection to homelab, except from LAN. So, bot accessing my SearxNG instance might not be the issue.

With degoog installed in the same fashion (docker + VPN), google engine seems to be unblocked for me (so far).

Not sure why degoog is not getting rate limited like SearxNG on the same system and same VPN. But, at least I’m happy :)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #159 for this comm, first seen 12th Mar 2026, 17:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Aw thank you so much for giving it a try and leaving such a nice feedback ♥️ I am searching in a slightly different way than searxng, can’t promise it’ll work forever but for now it seems to be doing the trick ♥️ I have some more improvements to the search system coming with the next release as Bing does get blocked quite often for me.

P.s. have you been using any extensions? If so what’s your fave so far? Haha

Ah! Forget about that part. The docker-compose file you provided on repo works for rootfull docker.

For rootless docker, it works, but library import is not possible for file permission issue.

I think I know how to solve it, I will give it a try over weekend, and will let you know.

Hey, not sure what you mean, it works perfectly fine as rootless. Are you using docker or podman? Someone else had this issue with podman and we couldn’t figure out why it was different for them.

Everyone else is running this as user 1000, which is what the standard compose requires?

Okay, that’s good to know. I’m not yet ready to self-host, but that’s a long term goal of mine. Thanks for explaining! 

If anyone hosts public instances of degoog, you could use one of those in the future!

If you have an old computer or anything like that lying around, I highly recommend trying out self-hosting though

I had the same problem so let me know if you find a solution! I just switched to running as root with podman

That’s good to know. I’ll save this for future reference. Thank you! 

Note that I’m running it on a rootless docker instance, and NOT on Podman. So, the following solution might or might not work for you.

services:
  degoog:
    image: ghcr.io/fccview/degoog:latest
    volumes:
      - ./.data:/app/data
    user: "0:0"
    ports:
      - "4444:4444"
    restart: unless-stopped

Explanation: rootless docker works a bit different from rootful docker. user 1000 (which is you on your server/machine) will be mapped to a different UID (e.g. 32555). This is to ensure that any process in docker container can’t have access to folders/files that you have access to, in case it manages to break free of docker containerization.

When you put user: “0:0” in a rootless docker container, it will assume your UID 1000 (which is you on your server/machine) inside docker container.

While it solves the file permission issue, but it is NOT a recommended way.

with user:1000:1000

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/e323c675-5235-4f9d-ad64-dcb3d2ed7aed.png

with user:0:0

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/31e651aa-88ae-4fe7-82c1-7004597ec69e.png

Please refer to this comment: https://lemmy.ml/comment/24567541

If you need any further information, let me know.

Is there a recommended way to do it? Could I give file permissions to the UID that docker has or something? Or put docker in the same user group as me

Well, your app made it to xda Congrats!

Madness, wasn’t expected to get any coverage for it until it was out of beta 😆

Thank you, that helped :)

I am not entirely sure why you need to do all that but I am trying a different approach and allowing a small entrypoint to set PGID and PUID (which you should be able to set as env variables in the docker-compose.yml file).

This should allow you to run the app as whatever user you wish. It works for me locally, it’s currently on the develop image if you wanna give it a spin and report back. Otherwise it’ll be added in the next release.

Defaults are still 1000:1000.