Hello lovely people, some of you know me for Jotty or Cr*nmaster, I have been waiting heads down for the dreaded 3 months before being finally able to show off what I have been working on recently.
In the past few months I have built what I believe is my coolest piece of work to date and I am so excited to finally share it with you all, it's a meta search aggregator (bit like 4get or searxng) and it's built to be minimal but heavily expandable.
This was born as a personal challenge on my discord server, I always had a few opinion on searxng and wanted to have my take on it, different tech, different ways to add engines, plugins and whatnot. Some people liked the idea on discord and tested it for a few weeks until I finally published it as a beta. It's now in a stable beta phase and has over 1k stars, i'm very happy with how it's growing, and the community around it is AWESOME!
-
Here's the repo:
-
Here's everything you need, from the community extensions stores to the cli commands to scaffold your own extensions
I think it's important to list out why degoog is different from the alternatives, and say that alternatives are what make the internet a beautiful place, so please don't bother with messages like "why not just use searxng", they really are two different concepts.
When adding stores you'll notice there's a few types of extensions engines, plugins, transports, autocompletes and themes. When you first install degoog it has 0 engines configured and you can go to the store and install any specific engine you want to use, this keeps everything light and customised. Similarly you can add autocompletes, a big variety of plugins and transports - transports are effectively ways to get data like curl, fetch but even more unconventional stuff like headless browsers or FlareSolverr.
Degoog also can be ran with an optional Valkey/Redis sidecar that'll nicely handle caching, keeping it extremely snappy and an optional indexer that you can enable locally. The indexer will store the top N results of any search query you make, keeping it all offline for next time you search for something related, imagine this as a long term persistent cache, but also imagine it as you building your own search engine locally, the more you use it.
For anyone worried about sqlite not scaling well on public instances, we're trying PostgreSQL on (I don't host nor maintain it, the person hosting it is on discord and having fun testing my mad ideas, I'm ever so thankful for the incredible community that's building around my apps ❤️).
One last thing, let's talk about AI, I use AI, responsibly, I am a software engineer, I use AI like a carpenter would use an electric saw instead of a manual saw. I am not gonna avoid using AI just because some people can't figure out the difference between vibe coding and AI assisted coding and I am not gonna be left behind with my pants down when eventually looking for a new job in the future to please random people online. This is a new skill that has to be learned, properly. All of the above is verifiable with a quick search, my username fccview is fully doxxed, you'll find me, my career and anything I've done until now, to reassure you I am actually an engineer and I actually do love coding.
For anyone worried about me using too much AI, don't worry, I painfully code to a detriment, you'll find a ton of fun bits and bobs in the codebase - which I encourage you to go through, as you should responsibly do, if you plan on selfhosting something. There'll be comments of my frustrations, ridiculous function names and whatever else, but I am disclosing this, so whenever somebody finds an emdash here and there in the documentation they know that yes, AI has been doing some stuff in my codebase too.
So tl;dr
Degoog is a self hosted meta search aggregator, it has a healthy and vibrant community and extension developers, it's growing organically and steadily and I'm very invested and in love with the project. Feel free to find bugs and raise issues, it's still in beta. Stable beta, but beta nonetheless. AMA, I'll be around responding any questions you may have, I love that part!
