Bruno reached out to me mid-April with a suggestion to check out his privacy-first search engine tool Uruky. Uruky works on a subscription model, but one of my kids and I were able to test it out for free for a couple of months.
I normally do not test privacy tools on request, but rather focus on describing tools I’ve discovered myself and already use in daily life. Yet the email conversation between us evolved into quite a warm exchange about his projects, my blog, networks and privacy tools in general. Bruno, being a software engineer, helped me better understand how local networks work, which led to my article about running a Monero node.
SearX really works best if you run your own node, not using one of the public ones. I run one on a tiny vps and it’s never blocked by any of the engines.
Caveat: you do give up some of the privacy advantages by being the only user. Thus, I invited my friends and family to also use it and it still works perfectly well. (ofc maybe just none of them actually use it and they’re just being polite about it)
Thank you for providing a testimonial on your experience running a searx node.
Will revisit running a node instead of relying on the worthless public nodes.