Hey,

Some of you may know me for Jotty and Cr*nmaster, been quiet with my head down lately improving my apps and trying to build a searxng alternative for myself.

Whilst I have used searxng for about a year now, I have had quite a few personal gripes with it (mostly stuff I personally would prefer worked differently) so in the past few weeks I have decided to make my take on it and ran it happily locally. Since publishing the beta to my discord server I ended up building a fairly extensive tool.

Degoog is actually pretty minimal, there’s no much to it aside from a very comprehensive plugin/extension system. The idea being users can create their own engines, themes and plugins that hook into the core application and do… pretty much anything, from adding stuff to the result page (e.g. speedtests, tmdb information, ip retrieval, rss feeds embedded on the home page) to full on OIDC systems.

This is still very much in beta and I figured the best way to get it out of beta would be to publish it to a wider audience (currently some users in our discord server have been testing it fairly successfully and i’ve been on top of bug fixing).

Repo: https://github.com/fccview/degoog

Official extensions: https://github.com/fccview/fccview-degoog-extensions

Docs: https://fccview.github.io/degoog

You can install custom plugins/extensions. You can make your own repo and add it to the store page in the settings, or you can just have your own plugins locally for yourself.

Let me know what you think, and feel free to ask any questions and feel free to join our discord (link in releases page on any of my apps) for a more direct chat about things <3

  • DeckPacker@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    1 day ago

    That looks amazing!

    I don’t want to bother you about that or anything, but Microsoft (who owns GitHub) is a company that’s actively hostile towards open source devs and is actively using GitHub to scrape insane amounts of training data for their own AI models without regard for consent.

    Have you considered moving to an alternative platform? Codeberg for example is quite good, all their code is open source and self hostable and the interface is quite easy to understand for someone, who is used to GitHub. It’s also managed by a nonprofit and it’s pretty easy to transfer you repo from GitHub to there.

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      5·
      23 hours ago

      Hey thank you!

      The issue with GitHub alternatives is the lack of runners/pipelines and restricting functionalities.

      Gitlab is a good alternative but I use it for work and having two accounts juggling between work/personal projects is a recipe for disaster.

      I spent a bit of time on codeberg and I am checking it out, happy to push the repo there too, but they don’t seem to provide pipeline options, so I wouldn’t be able to build the docker image there like I do on GitHub :)

      Btw whilst I do believe into the whole Microsoft scraping projects to train AI regardless of licenses, I wouldn’t say they are hostile towards open source. They actually are extremely for it, vscode is free and one of the best IDEs out there for example, GitHub free plan is VERY generous and they have a whole FREE coding academy with extremely in-depth courses on how to learn programming and various niche topics. And they integrated wsl to seamlessly run Linux commands within windows, which I never thought I’d see happen (been there for years, but I’m just giving you examples).

      • DeckPacker@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        23 hours ago

        I think they have their own action system (https://codeberg.org/actions/meta), but I’ve never tried it. Maybe you can look into that?

        My point about Microsoft was mainly because AI is harmful and often used in a hostile way against open source. Also the fact that Microsoft tries to own the whole free software ecosystem.

  • dieTasse@feddit.orgEnglish
    6·
    24 hours ago

    Nice, and interesting. I would reconsider the name though. Its hitting way too close to google. I know that was the intention, but I think you will be in google’s shadow because of it.

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      6·
      23 hours ago

      Thank you! I mean, I am not trying to compete with Google, maybe when I release out of beta I’ll let the community that’s slowly creating around it decide a new name, we’ll see ♥️ wouldn’t be the first time I do that with my apps :)

      • dieTasse@feddit.orgEnglish
        3·
        13 hours ago

        That would be awesome! Anyway good luck and have fun developing it, it’s interesting project 😊

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      4get.ca

      Oh that’s quite nice actually! Never seen it! Suppose it’s very minimal tho, I’ll do some market research to scope the competition lol I feel like more alternatives make a better internet, if you ask me :)

      p.s. thank you! sorted out the readme, my bad

  • fiberwoman15@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    Interesting. I like the idea of a search aggregator. I’m not super tech savvy, but I’d like to try this out. Is it possible to install this on iOS? Thanks in advance.

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      9 hours ago

      Hi, this needs to be selfhosted in order for you to use it, it’s not an app :) You can definitely use it from IOS once you have it running tho

  • thagoat@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

    So I put this on a server and have been messing about with it for an hour. I like it. Better than searx I think. I pointed nginx at it and I’ll use for a while. Thanks for all the hard work. Starred your repo also 😎

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Ow that’s a big compliment, thank you! I think it’s just different rather than better as it focuses on user experience more than niche features. It’s meant to be an easy way to move out of using Google daily, without too much of a learning curve

      Glad you are enjoying it ♥️

  • H Ramus@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    This is absolutely brilliant, well done! I’ll play around with it for a while. Was looking for a searx alternative as I keep getting no results and this is very timely! Awesome stuff, loving the Zen theme!

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      Thank you so much!! Let me know if you run into any issue, it’s fairly stable for a beta, but I’m sure there’s a ton of quirks that still need sorting ❤

    • crypt0cler1c@infosec.pubEnglish
      41·
      1 day ago

      SearX has been dead for a long time. SearXNG i s brilliant and has no problems. If you’re having problems, then it’s your server getting blocked. Not a problem with the application.

      • H Ramus@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        You’re correct, it’s a searXNG public instance. Wasn’t self hosting but using various public instances with low success. After a few searches the engines stop replying. I’ll be using this self hosted one for now. Really looking promising.

          • H Ramus@piefed.socialEnglish
            2·
            6 hours ago

            Boils down to not looking into it and being focused on other matters. This one seems quite straightforward and took five minutes to get it up.

  • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    251·
    2 days ago

    I have used searxng for about a year now, I have had quite a few personal gripes

    What gripes have you had? Curious. Maybe something I’ve overlooked.

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      40·
      2 days ago

      I keep getting results in different languages, a lot of my engines get rejected, it’s quite slow at times and building extensions for it is fairly complex. They also recently restructured their own codebase, which means most of my customisation didn’t work anymore, which is when I decided to build my own instead of re-making all the customisations from scratch.

      This is again very personal issues and specific to my use case frankly, and it could be that I wasn’t doing customisations right, but the way my brain works is to make something from scratch and learn the ins and out of it, so I just went for it.

      I guess it also is styled more to my linking (plus theming is very extensive) and I wanted to create something that slots things in if wanted (see tmdb above results and rss on the homepage)

    • ComradeMiao@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      2 days ago

      I found it oddly good at finding hidden pages containing the exact terms I was looking for but horrible at more general stuff

      • thestrike@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Just got it up and running! UI wise it’s super slick both on my phone and PC. It feels a lot better than searxng. My searxng instance also started getting blocked or something because my queries were failing, especially for images.

        Are there any plugins or themes to checkout yet or is that ecosystem still developing? I’d love to know the process so I can take a whack at making a theme or plugin myself

        • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          Hey! If you go to settings -> store you will find all the plugins/themes/engines I made and use the docs/existing plugins as examples to make your own, I tried to build a variety of them to cover most aspects of customisations ♥️

          Glad you like it! I saw you joined discord so feel free to ping me for more direct questions :)

  • Štěpán@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    My biggest issue with searxng is that google gets rejected all the time. But that’s because the instance gets rate limited, no? Do you deal with that more effectively somehow? Is it even possible?

      • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        Yes, I think that’s also very valid, the more people using the same instance the more likely it’ll be to get banned, but again, rotating proxy is key to this I suppose

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      Hey! Well, aside from rotating multiple user agents, have a cheeky retry and having a “retry” button next to each engine I also heavily cache results so that for 12 hours the same query will give you the same results from cache. You can always invalidate cache from the settings.

      Another thing you can also do is add multiple proxy that rotate on each request, traffic goes through proxy urls and you don’t get hit with rate limiting (again, proxy settings are in the settings tab - you can find free ones around).

      Searches happen asyncronously btw, which means if one engine hangs and fails the others will still return results quickly enough that clicking on the retry button shouldn’t be that big of an issue. The biggest engine I have had issues with has been Ecosia, always hitting that pesky cloudflare anti bot page, but that’s a third party extension engine, so it doesn’t matter too much

      So far I haven’t been rate limited by google yet, not gonna claim it won’t happen as it probably will, it’s the nature of the tool, but finger crossed so far so good.

      • Fmstrat@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        Why do these docs look like code? So odd… For my dumb brain trying to absorb this from a phone, is there a doc for what to enable in the Docker container that I’m not seeing?

  • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    I’ve been mostly happy with SearXNG but customization is a pain point of it for sure, so this looks really promising. Definitely gonna be keeping an eye on this one

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      YES! Customisation is the main reason why I went out of my way to build it, and other stuff I listed in another comment in the thread :)

      Thank you, if you ever end up making a store with your own plugins/themes and so on just lemme know and I’ll add it to the repo, it’d be cool to have a list of available stores already in the beta version, so when I go out of beta it’ll feel like a much more mature product <3