How I hosted my own search engine with my NAS

Running your own search engine sounds like overkill, but with the right tools, it’s actually really easy. I recently set up SearXNG on my TrueNAS Scale server, turning my NAS into a fully functional search engine that I control. It’s a project that not only gave me more privacy but also let me tailor search results to exactly what I need, without relying on big tech services like Google or Bing.

When it comes to searching the internet, many of us automatically gravitate towards Google, and for good reason. It’s fast, incredibly comprehensive, and the interface is very user-friendly. However, if you’re someone who sticks to Google exclusively, you might be missing out on a whole other world of search capabilities offered by metasearch engines. As a tech enthusiast, I’ve occasionally ventured beyond the comfort of Google’s search bar to explore what these alternative tools have to offer. SearXNG is one such metasearch engine that I’ve started using recently, and I’ve even made it my default search engine in Chrome.

The setup process was easier than you might think. SearXNG integrates smoothly with TrueNAS, and with a few tweaks, I had everything up and running with SearXNG as my default search engine. The best part? It all runs on hardware I already had at home, and I control everything about it.

What is SearXNG?

For the uninitated, SearXNG is an open-source, self-hosted search engine designed for individuals that want to take control of how they search the web. Unlike traditional search engines that rely on external servers and algorithms you can’t modify or control, SearXNG gives you the flexibility to run your own search index on your own hardware, such as on your NAS. It’s particularly appealing for privacy-conscious users, as all the data stays on your network, and you have complete control over how it’s indexed and accessed.

SearXNG is technically a metasearch engine, and you may have used one if you’ve used a search engine like DuckDuckGo, Dogpile, or MetaCrawler. Instead of running their own web crawlers to index the web, they compile results from a variety of other search engines to present a broader spectrum of information. This not only diversifies the search results you receive but also minimizes algorithmic influence in the results that you see.

At its core, SearXNG is a lightweight but powerful search solution that gives you the keys to build your own metasearch engine in the way that you want. It supports a ton of different search engines that it can aggregate, and supports specialized search engines too. For example, it can search Genius specifically and include song lyric results in searches, and you can use “bangs” which are basically commands to search on specific services in your search request so that you only get results from that service. It’s a bit of a learning curve over a “regular” search engine, but it gives the user a lot more control in the long run.

How I hosted SearXNG on my NAS and made it my default search engine

Using TrueNAS, it was pretty easy

SearXNG is available as a Docker container that you can deploy on any NAS, and that includes TrueNAS. Once it’s set up, it works instantly, and you can then navigate to the website in your browser to access it and begin searching. The instructions will differ depending on the NAS that you’re using, but on TrueNAS, it was available as a downloadable app from within the TrueNAS community train of applications, and you can use the Docker container to deploy it on other systems, too.

Once I set up SearXNG, the next step was to make it my default search engine on Google Chrome. While I thought that would be difficult, it turned out to be fairly easy. If you navigate to your browser’s settings, there will typically be an option to configure a search engine, and SearXNG will give you the search URL in a result that you find so that you can figure out where the query goes. For example, my search URL is as follows for “test”.

http://192.168.1.5:8080/search?q=test&language=auto&time_range=&safesearch=0&categories=general

In the above URL, you can see “q=test”, which is where the search query goes. In Chrome, do the following:

1. Go to Settings
2. Click Search engine
3. Click Manage search engines
4. Click Add beside site search, and add the URL, replacing “test” with %s, and setting a shortcut with an @ at the beginning.
5. Click the overflow menu and click Make default

You will now have SearXNG set as your default search engine in Chrome, and there are similar steps you can undertake on other browsers too. From now on you won’t have to worry about your privacy when searching online anywhere near as much, which is worth it to a lot of people, especially if you share your SearXNG instance with others, too.