Searx was removed from Debian with the latest release. I miss it quite a lot, and so I’m kicking the tires on SearxNG which is a newer project.
It is not packaged for Debian yet, so there’s not a package installation which would be a dependency for inclusion in FreedomBox. What is encouraging is that they have detailed installation instructions for Debian - and this did work for me. I hope that Debian packaging is on their roadmap - it looks like it is based on the instructions.
Step one is to get searxng built…
These are fairly involved instructions - lots of steps and lots of commands I’m unfamiliar with. The documented steps are complete and correct, so you can get through it if you pay attention to detail. There will be some installation apart from the package manager - so removal of searxng will not be handled by Debian. It’s about 268MB installed right now.
When you complete this you will be able to start searxng interactively meaning that is not a service or daemon that starts automatically. It will, however, be usable from your browser connecting to localhost:8888
Next step is to make this start as a service. SearxNG team claims this can be done using uwsgi, but I’m not familiar with this yet. I’ll post an update if I figure this out.