Part 1: Introduction to SearXNG

SearXNG is a free and open-source federated metasearch engine that serves as a fork of the original Searx project. Launched on March 27, 2021, SearXNG enables users enhanced privacy and flexibility in their search experiences. Unlike traditional search engines, SearXNG aggregates results from over 70 different search engines, including major players like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, while ensuring user anonymity and data protection.

Key Features of SearXNG

·???????? Privacy-Centric Design

·???????? No Tracking or Profiling

·???????? Ad-Free Experience

·???????? Categorical Searching

·???????? Customization Options

·???????? Self-Hosting Capability

·???????? Integration with Tor

In this section we will demo how to deploy Searxng as a Docker container in AWS ec2 instance and use the search engine from chrome browser to search. In the next part of this blog, we will be using this with ollama to create a AI based search engine using Llama3 and phi4 as the LLM.

We will not be covering the steps to create ec2 instance. we will assume this is already available we will start with deploying docker, docker-compose and searxng service and validating the same from our laptop/desktop.

The EC2 instance is running.

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?Steps to install Docker.

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Steps to Install Docker compose.

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?Searxng Docker compose . Thanks to dbeTech for sharing this simplified Docker compose.

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?Let us connect to the instance via putty.

Let us install Docker and docker-compose

Next docker-compose.

Next , we will create the searxng-compose.yaml file. Let us get the public IP address of the EC2 instance.

Now we will use this in our searxng-compose file.

Now let us deploy this by running the command.

docker-compose -f searxng-compose.yaml up -d

We can validate it by running the command.

docker ps?

Now we can open chrome browser and test it,

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Cleaning the installation

Next, we will bring down the service and remove the docker images.

Let us manually remove the images.

If we run “docker ps -a” we should not see any service running.

We can logout and shutdown ec2 instance.? In the Next part of the Blog, we will demo how to install Ollama and Open WebUI to experiment with ollama. In the Final Part we will integrate all this and create an AI Search engine.