--- source_url: "https://www.howtogeek.com/this-self-hosted-search-engine-helped-me-escape-googles-ai-redesign/" title: "This self-hosted search engine helped me escape Google's AI redesign" mirrored_at: 2026-08-13T15:40:27.536Z host: www.howtogeek.com cited_in_42a: true mirror_canonical: "https://index.42a.ai/www.howtogeek.com/this-self-hosted-search-engine-helped-me-escape-googles-ai-redesign/index" --- > **Original source:** https://www.howtogeek.com/this-self-hosted-search-engine-helped-me-escape-googles-ai-redesign/ Published Jun 9, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT Faisal Rasool has been a feature writer at How-to Geek since early 2024. He brings years of professional experience in simplifying technology for his readers on topics like mobile devices, PCs, and online privacy. He tries to help people get the most out of their gadgets and software with the least effort. In his teenage years, he spent hours every day tinkering with Android phones and Linux builds. Faisal started his career at WhatMobile in 2019 (mostly out of his obsession with Android) where he published over 2,000 news stories. Currently, he contributes to the news section over at AndroidHeadlines. He also authored more than 100 feature articles for SlashGear, covering Android, iOS, Web, Chromebooks, online privacy/security, and PC content.  Faisal has a Bachelor's in English literature, and loves to read and write. He also loves watercolors, retro video games, animation, and cats. Google is going all in on AI for the search engine. The company recently announced that it's going to soon replace the "ten blue links" with AI Overviews and AI Mode. I was already on the fence, but this pivot finally pushed me to self-host a search engine. And I'm glad I made the switch. ## This open-source search engine fixes everything wrong with mainstream search engines ### And it does not sacrifice the quality of the results SearXNG is an open-source meta search engine. The "meta" part means that it can query multiple search engines and display the best results from the pool. Currently, it supports some 70 search engines. It's also completely free and shows no ads anywhere. ![The SearXNG logo and search interface.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/9.png?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2) Most importantly, though, it feels like searching the internet before generative AI arrived on the scene. Almost every search engine has added some sort of AI overview or an AI answer box to the results page now. Even [DuckDuckGo is littered with AI results](https://www.howtogeek.com/duckduckgos-ai-summaries-are-less-invasive-than-googles/) and buttons. ![DuckDuckGo has AI buttons everywhere.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/duckduckgo-has-ai-buttons-everywhere.png?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2) On the other hand, this open-source engine just gives you a list of links and nothing else. It made me realize that I had stopped reading human-written pages because of AI results. It made the internet feel like a tiny place. After switching to SearXNG, I feel that I'm back on the open internet. This is what the search page looks like. Searching with SearXNG gives you a list of blue links, just like the old-school Google search, sans the ads and tracking. Note the small tags indicating the search engine a given result was sourced from. This particular search aggregated results from Google and DuckDuckGo. ![SearXNG aggregated results from Google and DuckDuckGo.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/searxng-aggregated-results-from-google-and-duckduckgo.png?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2) ## It has a nice interface and some handy features ### You won't miss your regular search engine To customize the search engine results, click the little gear icon on the search page. Head to the "Engines" tab, where you can decide which search engines you want to enable. Also, notice the codes beginning with !. These are called "bangs" and you can [use these codes to target any of these engines directly](https://www.howtogeek.com/711984/how-to-use-bangs-in-duckduckgo-to-search-other-websites/). For example, I can start a search with `!yt`, and it'll give me results from YouTube. You can expand a video and watch it without leaving the search page. Pretty handy. The Images tab also aggregates results from the meta engines, and you can customize exactly which image search engines you want to get the results from. You can flip through the slideshow and save images by right-clicking on the previews. For maps, SearXNG defaults to [OpenStreetMap](https://www.howtogeek.com/android-app-gives-you-points-for-fixing-your-local-open-source-map/) or Apple Maps. Google also has these neat applets, like currency converters, calculators, translators, thesaurus, and so on. SearXNG doesn't have all those features, but it does have a few that you can enable in the settings and access using their respective bang calls. - ![SearXNG has several search engines available.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/searxng-has-several-search-engines-available.png?q=49&fit=contain&w=2454&h=1344&dpr=2) - ![SearXNG has multiple image providers.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/searxng-has-multiple-image-providers.png?q=49&fit=contain&w=2454&h=1348&dpr=2) - ![SearXNG image slideshow.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/searxng-image-slideshow.png?q=49&fit=contain&w=2454&h=1348&dpr=2) - ![SearXNG image results.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/searxng-image-results.png?q=49&fit=contain&w=2454&h=1348&dpr=2) - ![SearXNG maps.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/searxng-maps.png?q=49&fit=contain&w=2454&h=1348&dpr=2) - ![Using a YouTube bang in SearXNG.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/using-a-youtube-bang-in-searxng.png?q=49&fit=contain&w=2454&h=1348&dpr=2) - ![SearXNG plugins.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/searxng-plugins.png?q=49&fit=contain&w=2454&h=1348&dpr=2) - ![SearXNG maps.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/searxng-maps-1.png?q=49&fit=contain&w=2454&h=1348&dpr=2) - ![SearXNG interface settings.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/searxng-interface-settings.png?q=49&fit=contain&w=2454&h=1344&dpr=2) The overall quality of the results is pretty decent, especially if you've only enabled the big search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo. Lesser known engines degrade the quality of the results in my experience. It also feels fast enough, but occasionally you might see glitches like some upstream engines fail to load, or the applet modules fail to run. Most of the time, it works just fine though. There's also a mobile app for SearXNG, which connects to your self-hosted instance. ![SearXNG mobile app connected to my local instance.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/1780676224653.jpg?q=70&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=1) ![A Raspberry Pi 5. ](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/raspberry-pi-5-1.png?q=70&fit=contain&w=420&dpr=1) ##### Raspberry Pi 5 **Brand** Raspberry Pi **Storage** 8GB **CPU** Cortex A7 **Memory** 8GB ## It's built to anonymize you ### This setup is as private as you can get with a search engine SearXNG is built to anonymize your search queries. When you search using SearXNG, it strips all your personal identifiers and browser profile to send an anonymized request to the target search engines. So, instead of your computer's IP and other fingerprinted data, those engines just see the IP address of the server SearXNG is running on. You can access SearXNG from its many public instances if you want to give it a try. However, you will have to trust the maintainer of that instance to not keep logs of your data. That's why it's better to host SearXNG yourself. It'll give you complete control over your data. I'm hosting my instance on a VPS (basically a virtual machine in the cloud), so the upstream search engines only see the public IP of that VPS. This setup completely anonymizes my data entirely because the search engines never see my home IP address or location. To Google or DuckDuckGo, the request seems to be coming from the country the VPS is hosted in. I created a [Docker Compose](https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-is-docker-compose-and-how-do-you-use-it/) file on my server to create and run a Docker container for SearXNG. That's all you need to access the search engine. Everything else is configured using the settings page on the SearXNG web app. ![The Docker Compose file used to spin up my instance of SearXNG.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/screenshot-2026-06-05-at-9-06-16-pm.png?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2) I've also set up a reverse proxy with Caddy to access my instance of SearXNG on the open internet. So I can access it on any network, any device, anywhere in the world, just like a regular website. It looks something like this. search.mydomain.com ![A SearXNG instance running on my home server.](https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/ksnip_20260402-175731.png?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2) * * * ### I'm never going back to Google My self-hosted instance of SearXNG has been the default on all my devices for the past few weeks, and I never felt the need to Google at all.