Hey,

Some of you may know me for Jotty and Cr*nmaster, been quiet with my head down lately improving my apps and trying to build a searxng alternative for myself.

Whilst I have used searxng for about a year now, I have had quite a few personal gripes with it (mostly stuff I personally would prefer worked differently) so in the past few weeks I have decided to make my take on it and ran it happily locally. Since publishing the beta to my discord server I ended up building a fairly extensive tool.

Degoog is actually pretty minimal, there’s no much to it aside from a very comprehensive plugin/extension system. The idea being users can create their own engines, themes and plugins that hook into the core application and do… pretty much anything, from adding stuff to the result page (e.g. speedtests, tmdb information, ip retrieval, rss feeds embedded on the home page) to full on OIDC systems.

This is still very much in beta and I figured the best way to get it out of beta would be to publish it to a wider audience (currently some users in our discord server have been testing it fairly successfully and i’ve been on top of bug fixing).

Repo: https://github.com/fccview/degoog

Official extensions: https://github.com/fccview/fccview-degoog-extensions

Docs: https://fccview.github.io/degoog

You can install custom plugins/extensions. You can make your own repo and add it to the store page in the settings, or you can just have your own plugins locally for yourself.

Let me know what you think, and feel free to ask any questions and feel free to join our discord (link in releases page on any of my apps) for a more direct chat about things <3

  • DeckPacker@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    1 month ago

    That looks amazing!

    I don’t want to bother you about that or anything, but Microsoft (who owns GitHub) is a company that’s actively hostile towards open source devs and is actively using GitHub to scrape insane amounts of training data for their own AI models without regard for consent.

    Have you considered moving to an alternative platform? Codeberg for example is quite good, all their code is open source and self hostable and the interface is quite easy to understand for someone, who is used to GitHub. It’s also managed by a nonprofit and it’s pretty easy to transfer you repo from GitHub to there.

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Hey thank you!

      The issue with GitHub alternatives is the lack of runners/pipelines and restricting functionalities.

      Gitlab is a good alternative but I use it for work and having two accounts juggling between work/personal projects is a recipe for disaster.

      I spent a bit of time on codeberg and I am checking it out, happy to push the repo there too, but they don’t seem to provide pipeline options, so I wouldn’t be able to build the docker image there like I do on GitHub :)

      Btw whilst I do believe into the whole Microsoft scraping projects to train AI regardless of licenses, I wouldn’t say they are hostile towards open source. They actually are extremely for it, vscode is free and one of the best IDEs out there for example, GitHub free plan is VERY generous and they have a whole FREE coding academy with extremely in-depth courses on how to learn programming and various niche topics. And they integrated wsl to seamlessly run Linux commands within windows, which I never thought I’d see happen (been there for years, but I’m just giving you examples).

      • DeckPacker@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 month ago

        I think they have their own action system (https://codeberg.org/actions/meta), but I’ve never tried it. Maybe you can look into that?

        My point about Microsoft was mainly because AI is harmful and often used in a hostile way against open source. Also the fact that Microsoft tries to own the whole free software ecosystem.

  • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    111·
    1 month ago

    I have used searxng for about a year now, I have had quite a few personal gripes

    What gripes have you had? Curious. Maybe something I’ve overlooked.

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      16·
      1 month ago

      I keep getting results in different languages, a lot of my engines get rejected, it’s quite slow at times and building extensions for it is fairly complex. They also recently restructured their own codebase, which means most of my customisation didn’t work anymore, which is when I decided to build my own instead of re-making all the customisations from scratch.

      This is again very personal issues and specific to my use case frankly, and it could be that I wasn’t doing customisations right, but the way my brain works is to make something from scratch and learn the ins and out of it, so I just went for it.

      I guess it also is styled more to my linking (plus theming is very extensive) and I wanted to create something that slots things in if wanted (see tmdb above results and rss on the homepage)

    • ComradeMiao@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      1 month ago

      I found it oddly good at finding hidden pages containing the exact terms I was looking for but horrible at more general stuff

  • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    I’ve been mostly happy with SearXNG but customization is a pain point of it for sure, so this looks really promising. Definitely gonna be keeping an eye on this one

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      YES! Customisation is the main reason why I went out of my way to build it, and other stuff I listed in another comment in the thread :)

      Thank you, if you ever end up making a store with your own plugins/themes and so on just lemme know and I’ll add it to the repo, it’d be cool to have a list of available stores already in the beta version, so when I go out of beta it’ll feel like a much more mature product <3

  • Karna@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    First of all, thanks a ton.

    I have been using SearxNG for more than year, running it as docker container on my Homelab. It’s connected to internet via Mullvad VPN.

    Lately, I have see both Google and Bing search engines are either not working or returning complete garbage results.

    My firewall setup doesn’t allow any incoming connection to homelab, except from LAN. So, bot accessing my SearxNG instance might not be the issue.

    With degoog installed in the same fashion (docker + VPN), google engine seems to be unblocked for me (so far).

    Not sure why degoog is not getting rate limited like SearxNG on the same system and same VPN. But, at least I’m happy :)

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Aw thank you so much for giving it a try and leaving such a nice feedback ♥️ I am searching in a slightly different way than searxng, can’t promise it’ll work forever but for now it seems to be doing the trick ♥️ I have some more improvements to the search system coming with the next release as Bing does get blocked quite often for me.

      P.s. have you been using any extensions? If so what’s your fave so far? Haha

      • Karna@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        Ah! Forget about that part. The docker-compose file you provided on repo works for rootfull docker.

        For rootless docker, it works, but library import is not possible for file permission issue.

        I think I know how to solve it, I will give it a try over weekend, and will let you know.

        • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          1 month ago

          Hey, not sure what you mean, it works perfectly fine as rootless. Are you using docker or podman? Someone else had this issue with podman and we couldn’t figure out why it was different for them.

          Everyone else is running this as user 1000, which is what the standard compose requires?

          YES please, if you could let me know if you figure this one out it’d be great, especially if it’s due to podman so I can send a message in my discord for the other user who was struggling with it :)

            • fccview@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              1·
              26 days ago

              Thank you, that helped :)

              I am not entirely sure why you need to do all that but I am trying a different approach and allowing a small entrypoint to set PGID and PUID (which you should be able to set as env variables in the docker-compose.yml file).

              This should allow you to run the app as whatever user you wish. It works for me locally, it’s currently on the develop image if you wanna give it a spin and report back. Otherwise it’ll be added in the next release.

              Defaults are still 1000:1000.