search engine part II

Wed 06 May 2015

Searching (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Few month ago, I wrote a post about search engines . I recently tested a meta-engine. I think it is time for an update. This search engine is searx .

installation

There is a AUR package called searx-git . I just installed it as an AUR. No unusual difficulties. Take care of python dependencies: the version of python required is 2.7

settings

Most of the setting part consist in editing settings.yml . The file is well documented and easy to understand. You may find it, along with the rest of your searx-installation, under /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages 1

running

If you have python3 installed, you may have some trouble. I run searx using the command:

python2 /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/searx/webapp.py

You may then connect to http://localhost:8888 .

comparing

I tried to compare the results for diferents queries on different searx nodes. Public nodes I tried are

searx.me , the official reference for searx node
framabee , a french initiative
my local node

The differences I notice came from the search engines activated. There are other that may come from the lag, as performing the same request a second time after few seconds results in results from some search engine appearing on the first page.

(NON-)Related articles

default settings↩