Setting up your own search engine

Ever wanted your search engine? Well, it would be a lot of work to have your own. But you can have multiple search engine’s on your website. 

Networking guru and YouTube sensation Network Chuck released a demo video in 2022 that showed viewers how to set it up. 

In order to get a detailed view of how to set up such a thing, I highly encourage watching his tutorial. It took me less than an hour to get it right (more on that later). 

Essentially, I created an instance of Linux using a cloud service and ensured the latest updates were installed – mainly for security purposes. I then went to my web host’s settings to construct a subdomain (e.g. bob.bobswebsite.com). Next, I installed a metasearch engine called SearXNG (details on Github) using Docker. SearXNG was allowed to run in the background as a daemon

Screen grab of my metasearch engine page.
Screen grab of my metasearch engine page.

As shown above, the website was able to load most times. The SearXNG site would disappear when occasionally refreshed. I later realized that I didn’t update all of the A records (What’s an A record?) to the IP address of the Linux instance running the page. Once the changes were made, the page’s presence was consitent. 

It was a fun little project that got me excited about setting up Linux in the cloud – no local computer needed – and the future possibilities with this. Cloud is the future, man. 

You can find the search engine at search.charleseroop.com.