1187
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
1187 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
59742 readers
3958 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Genuine question, what happens to SearX if google pulls the plug on API access or changes the algorithm in a way that makes it worse?
If Kagi got an actual code audit done I would be a lot more on board with it. The audit they do show appears to just be penetration testing, not focused on the code itself but I don't know much about so maybe there is more to it that I don't understand.
I wish it were easier for developers to monetize their projects while leaving them open source. Tutanota is a good example of open source code used in a paid service. With tutanota however it seems like what you pay for is the service, not the software.
I am not the most knowledgeable person on searxng innerworkings so may be wrong, but searxng instances usually use the 'get' and 'post' commands to request+fetch http/https content not an API key. You can get your own api keys/tokens from google and plug them in to searx in the preferences menu if they ever make it API only. There's a lot of IT academic research that relies on google they will most likely never pull API access fullstop but you never you I guess.
There is not much if anything SearXNG instances can do if google changes algorithm. In worst case scenario it can still index other search engines which themselves scrape google like startpage or engines completely independent like duckduckgo, bing, brave, YaCy, ect. Here is a list of all configured engines SearXNG uses by default you can go into preferences at top right of searXNG to configure what engines you want to use among other things.
It just worries me that there isn't really a google competitor if all the alternatives rely on google not screwing up a product. It seems like honest search results are becoming less of a thing they care about.