# FreedomBox/Manual/Searx

## Web Search (Searx)

### About Searx

Searx is a metasearch engine. A metasearch engine aggregates the results from various search engines and presents them in a unified interface.

Read more about Searx on their official website.

Available since: version 0.24.0

### Screenshot

Searx Screenshot

### Screencast

Searx installation and first steps (14 MB)

### Why use Searx?

#### Personalization and Filter Bubbles

Search engines have the ability to profile users and serve results most relevant to them, putting people into filter bubbles, thus distorting people's view of the world. Search engines have a financial incentive to serve interesting advertisements to their users, increasing their chances of clicking on the advertisements.

A metasearch engine is a possible solution to this problem, as it aggregates results from multiple search engines thus bypassing personalization attempts by search engines.

Searx avoids storing cookies from search engines as a means of preventing tracking and profiling by search engines.

#### Advertisement filtering

Searx filters out advertisements from the search results before serving the results, thus increasing relevance the of your search results and saving you from distractions.

#### Privacy

Searx uses HTTP POST instead of GET by default to send your search queries to the search engines, so that anyone snooping your traffic wouldn't be able to read your queries. The search queries wouldn't stored in browser history either.

Note: Searx used from Chrome browser's omnibar would make GET requests instead of POST.

### Searx on FreedomBox

- Searx on FreedomBox uses Single Sign On. This means that you should be logged in into your FreedomBox in the browser that you're using Searx.

- SearX is easily accessible via Tor.

- Searx can be added as a search engine to the Firefox browser's search bar. See Firefox Help on this topic. Once Searx is added, you can also set it as your default search engine.

- Searx also offers search results in csv, json and rss formats, which can be used with scripts to automate some tasks.

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