neon-mmd, neon_arch@programming.dev

Sorry for the delay in the response.

Thank you :)

Your welcome 💐

1. What I meant by that question was rather “what’s the design vision?” Is the intended usage more like everyone should have their own, or rather those should be shared with more people (to lump up different topics originating from the same machine)

The design vision for the websurfx engine is to protect user’s privacy, and to have a really secure and fast search engine along with that also provide a really customizable, safe (like the level of protection you want for the safe search to go even allowing you to use filter lists to filter out specific websites from the search results), highly theme-able, and with organic and ad-free search results. So that the user can get a search engine which is entirely their own.

And for the case whether you should self-host it or use an instance of it depends on your threat level. Like many people because of your threat model may prefer self-hosting as they may not want to have their data served from a computer that is not their own.

Sorry, for the delay in the response.

Do you have the useragentstring.com website blocked by anything? Like using nextdns or filter lists of any sort. 😅

It needs to contact this website to get the random user agent string to spoof the user agent string of the user’s search query to protect the user’s privacy (that’s why it is important.).

Thanks ❤ for taking a look at our project, if you need any help then ask them here or DM me. I would be very glad to help. 😊

Yes, sure, no problem, I will answer all you questions one by one:

1. Yes, that’s how it works at high POV but also in a privacy oriented similar to searxng (so only your IP address is shared with the upstream engine but you can spoof that using VPN or by using the proxy feature in websurfx). Additionally we also rerank the search results after fetching search results from the upstream engines, to make it more organic (though, we admit not the best but contributions will help us alot in that area for sure. 😅 )

2. No, currently no, but you can open a feature request issue about it at our project here.

3. Yes, it is stored as a config, cookie and also you can export the cookie from the UI and then import it again (this can be useful if you change browser or clear cookies for some reason).

4. Yes, I explained about it and how to get around with it in the first point. 😅

5. I think it is better to self-host then depend on like an instance because you still have many privacy issues with VPSs (because it is still someone else’s computer), but we do provide privacy enhancing features like encypting cache results which can help in evading the VPS from spying your/users search results in the cache.

6. Not really, as far as I know they don’t block on the basis of that their ads not being displayed but yes there is still a chance that you could flagged by some engines because they want users to use their search engines because they do want to sell the user as their product (which is the same problem, searxng does have too, so there is nothing we can do about it but yes we can improve the bot evasion system, so that even less engines do it and we would welcome contributions in that area). 😅

Also, if you have more questions about anything feel free to ask, we would be very glad to answer them 😊 and we appreciate it 👍 too as it also helps answer and clarify other people’s doubts too.

Yes, you are right but in a privacy oriented manner (only your IP address is shared nothing else - that also you know you can change it via VPN or proxy), your user agent is random every time you make a request, there is random delay added, etc and also no ads in your search results. Moreover we rerank the results on our side (not the most perfect but contributions can help make us make it better). 😅

(Disclaimer: I am the owner of the project)

Thanks ❤️ for having a look at our project, if you need any help then feel free to DM me here or ask it here, I would be glad to help 😊 .

You check out my previous post for it:

https://programming.dev/post/2678496

I explain everything in it in great detail 😅

(Disclaimer: btw, I am the owner of the project)