A few months ago SearX officially stopped development forever. The repo was made read only, and all support for it has ceased. ( GitHub - searx/searx: Privacy-respecting metasearch engine )
With this in mind, should it be planned to exchange out SearX for SearXNG since the development for that is still on going, and is considered the successor to SearX?
I can also try working on this myself by updating the installation scripts.
Any news on that front?
The DuckDuckGo backend of SearX seems not to work any more (luckily the Bing backend still works, but I’d much rather use DuckDuckGo), so it’s become more urgent for me.
If the Debian package for SearXNG comes to fruition, we will be able to quickly add it to FreedomBox (perhaps even to stable users via backports). Are any of your able to contribute to the packaging effort of SearXNG using the packaging already available for SearX?
Is there any actual or planned progress on the move to SearXNG?
So, here we are in May 2025 - There is only step-by-step instructions on how to install SearXNG to Debian, which can be found here:https://docs.searxng.org/admin/installation-searxng.html, but no efforts (that I have found yet) to package this for Debian. With Debian 13 (Trixie) currently in development freeze for release, I don’t see that this will become a viable package in Trixie. Sadly, my instance of SearX on my FreedomBox server is now (recently) no longer functional, and I’m not sure if the above installation instructions that are given will integrate nicely with FreedomBox. Maybe there is some other Debian packaged search integration we can use here? I would very much like to see replies here, as this is a serious loss of functionality to my FreedomBox, as I’m sure it is (or will be) to others.This is probably the one feature of FreedomBox I use (or have used) the most, honestly. Maybe we could put this to some kind of vote, to choose a successor to SearX, or to attempt to package SearXNG for Debian. Just not sure here, I welcome replies to this thread.
I think this could be done with a Podman container the same way we setup Nextcloud.