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

  • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    5·
    6 hours 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.