Privacy-Preserving Personal Search Appliance · ariya.io

This is powered by SearXNG, an excellent open-source meta search engine.

Unlike traditional search engines like Google or Bing, SearXNG doesn’t crawl the web and index content. Instead, it leverages other search engines like DuckDuckGo, Qwant, and Mojeek to fetch results while protecting your privacy. This means your personal information isn’t tracked by those upstream services.

With the rise of LLMs and RAG, SearXNG has gained even more popularity. But I’ll dive into that in a future post.

Setting up SearXNG is a breeze. You can use Docker or Podman (my favorite Docker replacement, everyone should use it!) to get it running quickly. In fact, I encourage you to try it on your main machine. You’ll be surprised how easy it is!

A little fun fact about the name. SearXNG is an active fork of SearX. As typically the case, NG usually stands for “next generation”. However, the X in SearX is actually the Greek letter chi, which is often transliterated as “ch”. So, you could think of SearXNG as “searching”.

While you can run SearXNG on your main machine, a dedicated device offers several advantages. You can share it with your family or colleagues and add extra security layers like Tailscale, Wireguard, or the good old OpenVPN.

For my little box, I chose a used Shuttle DH170 with an Intel Core i3 6100 (2 cores, 4 threads) and 16GB of RAM. This might seem like overkill, but it’s more than enough for SearXNG. The 200GB SSD is also plenty of storage. The total cost of the hardware was just $70. I could have saved more by using less RAM and storage, but I had these components on hand.

In terms of power consumption, the appliance idles at around 10W. I haven’t optimized it yet using tools like PowerTOP, but even so, it’s quite efficient. The off-the-shelf x86 architecture offers excellent upgrade potential. I could easily swap in a more powerful CPU like an Intel Core i7 6700 (4 cores, 8 threads) or add more RAM and storage if needed.

Initially, I considered using Proxmox to manage the system and run SearXNG in a container. However, I found this to be too complex. Instead, I opted for a simpler approach using vanilla Debian and Podman.Then, I remembered that there is project, CasaOS, a user-friendly home server OS. It offers a web-based interface for remote management and can easily run SearXNG. If you’re new to home servers, CasaOS is a great way to get started.

For those who prefer a more resource-constrained solution, you could use a Raspberry Pi or similar device. CasaOS also works well on ARM-based systems.

In today’s digital age, privacy is a fundamental right. Unfortunately, our digital footprints are being exploited, and our personal data is being harvested. Rampant privacy violations are becoming the norm. Let’s take proactive steps to protect ourselves and our loved ones!