Project status: development focus has shifted to Hister

I wanted to share a personal update with the community: I have shifted my active development focus away from this project to a new search tool I've been building called Hister: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister .

Why?

Searx is a metasearch engine, it is fundamentally dependent on third-party search engines, which creates inherent limitations that are difficult (or impossible) to solve within the current architecture:

• Results are only as good as what upstream engines expose
• Privacy guarantees are partial, requests and queries still leave your machine
• Relevance ranking is limited to what scraped results provide
• No persistent memory of what you have already read or found useful

Hister takes a different approach: instead of querying other engines, it indexes content you choose, web pages, local files, browser history into a fully local, self-hosted full-text search index. This eliminates most of the conceptual weaknesses that come with being a metasearch engine while giving you complete control over your data.

I still believe searx was a worthwhile project and I am grateful for everyone who contributed and used it.

If the ideas behind searx resonate with you, I invite you to take a look at Hister, it may address things you always wanted from a personal search tool.