SEARX Metasearch Engine
Public instance of searx hosted by VNL/Antipostal
Begins content copied from Searx syntax — Searx Documentation
© Copyright 2015-2022, Adam Tauber, Noémi Ványi.
Search syntax
Searx allows you to modify the default categories, engines and search language via the search query.
Prefix !
to set Category/engine
Prefix: :
to set language
Prefix: ?
to add engines and categories to the currently selected categories
Abbreviations of the engines and languages are also accepted. Engine/category modifiers are chainable and inclusive (e.g. with !it !ddg !wp qwer search in IT category and duckduckgo and wikipedia for qwer)
See the /preferences page for the list of engines, categories and languages.
Examples
Multilingual Search
Searx does not support true multilingual search. You have to use the language prefix in your search query when searching in a different language.
But there is a workaround: By adding a new search engine with a different language, Searx will search in your default and other language.
Example configuration in settings.yml for a German and English speaker:
search:
language : "de"
…
engines:
- name : google english
engine : google
language : english
…
When searching, the default google engine will return German results and “google english” will return English results.
Ends content copied from https://searx.github.io/searx/user/search_syntax.html\\© Copyright 2015-2022, Adam Tauber, Noémi Ványi.
Code fidelity
VN's searx is a fork of searx.github.io/searx publicly available on github.com/vitaprimo/searx. VN's instance is pulled straight from GitHub then a single file is modified — utils/brand.env — before installation. After installation another file is modified; the image on the frontpage is replace by VN's design which was originally the reason it was forked in the first place.
This isn't necessary anymore, if you check out the GitHub repo, you'll see that the hero image is already preset.
However, the contribution was never made because it was feared it would be rejected because of two reasons:
1. It's not a code contribution. Having never created a [voluntary] pull request, it's an unknown world of rules and criteria to be met.
2. It's a design which might be seen as imposing or disrespectful or the creators' own stylistic decisions.
Infrastructure, region, domain name
About the domain name
VN's searx instance was registered a long time ago on searx.space under the domain searx.vitanetworks.link. It was shut down a few times in the past where it was discovered that despite of this, it would be remembered and it would reappear whenever it was brought back.
However, the last time it was shut down it was for a very long time because of search engines were blocking it and it would take too long to respond. During this period SearxNG was created on the developers' side and on our side we starting moving our services to our email domain, antipostal.com, simply because it's more memorable.
searx will continue were it was before, searx.vitanetworks.link; the domain is backup up an Active Directory infrastructure, so it's a safe bet it will continue to exist, just as the same is true for our newer domain where searx is now hosted: searx.antipostal.com.
Server location factors
If you were to ask in what country you can reach our servers, it'd be tricky to answer. For instance, our old searx.space listing never reflected reality because it only pointed to the our gateway which is in a different datacenter in a different country than where the actual servers are.
We're always open to suggestions, specially if you happen to be involved in the development of searx. Top priorities currently are:
- Public cloud providers with low latency, no data caps on a countries where there's little or no abusive use of copyright laws; where it's clear they serve only for profit, not /"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."/1)
- These are only used as gateways; VN Antipostal's servers are in a country with little to no copyright abuse. In fact, it's easier to find any kind of piracy in a government's building than a frivolous lawsuit. Much more likely. Even if we're not seeking to infringe on anything, there's less chance of servers being raided for something stupid.
Finding out if Cloudflare offers an unfiltered public service, such as Quad9's 9.9.9.10.Suggestions for the replacement altogether of our Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 DNS over TLS upstream.
We're transitioning away from both Cloudflare and Quad9 as upstream resolvers. New firewalls and DNS servers were deployed to do the resolution on our own. Additionally, we're joining OpenNIC and hosting a Tier 1 or Tier 2 server, most likely Tier 2 to use the opportunity to deploy public DNS and DoT servers. We believe that the lack of policying DoH/DNScrypt/XoT/etc. have, make them too dangerous to show support for. DoT lets you know what type of content it is by the well-known port.
All of our servers are on-prem, behind a fast fiber connection. It was, in fact, the ability to self-host why searx was appealing to us, it was made public for the same reason all of our other services are made public: it's nor environmentally conscious to run servers designed for thousands of connections for just a handful of people. Unfortunately our ISP doesn't lease static addresses anymore, IPv4 nor IPv6, and since one of those big budget (in every sense of the word) is Exchange Server, we need a static IP address.
To fulfill that requirement we run a small gateway on a remote datacenter in our neighboring country up north, the US. It was chosen because it was the only one that met our criteria: having the same data caps our ISP has (none ). The gateway is a FreeBSD-based firewall/tunnel/DoT encapsulation server hosted on DreamCompute , an OpenStack service division of DreamHost.
All of our DNS is routed over there, if that server is down, our DNS is down regardless if there's Internet access locally. DNS request made by searx are passed through several local filters before ultimately reaching that server which encapsulates them in DNS over TLS and sends them to our upstream servers: the non-filtered public service from Quad92) and Cloudflare.3) 4)
If you're familiar with the DNS requirements for email, you probably know that domains that host email must have a machine record (routable A for IPv4, AAAA for IPv6) at the same level that matches what's after the @ symbol, regardless it's a bogus address, just as it must have a PTR record for the originating public address or the service, this one can be bogus though—It's a spam thing. Because antipostal.com was creating specifically to handle our email service, it meets both of these requirements. Thus you should always find searx.antipostal.com at the IPv4 address 208.113.135.20, real hostname is cloudfront.vitanetworks.link. It also has the IPv6 address [2607:f298:5:101d:f816:3eff:fe38:153e] but instead for IPv6 we'll use our Hurricane Electric /48 block: [2001:470:b9dd::]. As far as IPv4 concerns, depending on the geographic information you query from, it might be located in the Ashburn, Virginia in the Mid-Atlantic US or in the completely opposite side of Brea, California in the Southwestern US, where DreamCompute/DreamHost HQ likely is.
Despite looking political, traffic to and from Russia and China is blocked for rather pragmatic reasons: on the inbound, these are the countries that consistently trigger our IPS/IDS and other security systems the most plus the fact that we don't even share the same alphabets vastly reduces the chances for legitimate traffic coming from these locations. On the outbound China is blocked for because of Xiaomi devices, and Russia because it's already blocked one way, it simplifies the ruleset.
However, for IPv6, well be using our Hurricane Electric /48 block, [2001:470:b9dd::].
Everything beyong out local firewall out is considered public, including the traffic in the tunnel, An unencrypted site t