Should there be a local search history? In extension, all saved in cookies only (up to last 5 searches or so), and not transferred beyond the currently used device.
Of course we get that search histories are sensitive, so this will be disabled by default.
The "Brave Budapest" i.e. Release Candidate 1 or MVP version has been completed, so we encourage you to follow the progress on RC2 "Calm Canberra" right below:
The SearXNG instance, with the Peekr MVP launch in mind, has officially shut down. We will keep the svmetasearch.eu.org domain up and running, though. This will be a redirect to our new search engine project in the future, but we ask you to change defaults (to staging.peekr.org for now) if you were using SVMetaSearch as a primary engine in the past, as soon as possible.
If you know an another public SearXNG instance allowing users to download JSON results, please contact us and we will swap defaults in Peekr's settings.
Did you know? Peekr not only warns you that tracking takes place, but also lists out every single tracker found. For less clutter, this is off by default, but you can easily turn on these reports by flipping "Count website trackers" in settings.
It's as if I had uBlock Origin without uBlock Origin*.
How does this work? When our crawler approaches any website, it takes required metadata of all pages allowed to be indexed (title, meta description tag, URL), takes full text content (trimming each paragraph to 1,024 characters maximum), assumes content language, and finally - crawler checks for any 3rd-party resources.
We've built it like that with a reasonable explanation: if you just request an external resource, your IP address, user agent and likely many more data lands not only at website provider's servers, but at 3rd parties, too. Especially Facebook and TikTok with their pixels are the most seen offenders, alongside Google's quite huge tracking scripts.
Because awareness about how much our favourite sites can rely way too much on external resources, instead of even proxying it to the provider's servers is low, this is where we take up on battling with, and promoting more sane way of serving people on the internet. That is, less (ideally nought) trackers and hefty resources from 3rd parties, and more 1st-party content.
Hey, I've heard Bing frontends are gone temporarily.
Because we know how search engine is a crucial part of most, if not all internet users, please consider donating some spare money, so we can expand our index, finally push the first MVP and reinforce our crawler: https://zrzutka.pl/9f6x3v
Thank you!
If you do not have PLN but still want to donate, contact me on Matrix: @slavistapl:noevil.pl
We've initially thought it was a DDoS attack - this is the first thought when an immediate sustained surge in search requests happens. Requests were counted somewhere between 160 to even 200 thousands daily. This is an unprecedented growth - we were noting 300 to 400 (not thousands of) searches daily. Some things I could recall before this happened, is that @lukaso666 was seeking for Esperanto translations (thank you!) proofreading, and some singular mentions about us to other fediverse users.
As we do not maintain anything else in the SoMe world besides our fediverse presence, it is unknown whether someone popular outside of this bubble found out our search engine and mentioned us.
We will be continuing works on the infrastructure later this evening or tomorrow.
EDIT: the last update of our statistics brought us a new record 🎉