Yet another Hacker News

Bong: DuckDuckGo bang alternative, open-source and self-hosted

12 points captain_bender 2 hours ago 3 comments

Shank 55 minutes ago | parent

Well, I just probably am not going to use a software product named “bong” but I suppose that’s just me.

I think the issue with running something like this or SearXNG is that the good indexes will fight your efforts to use them unless you pay up and use the API. This product also suggests the google smart suggest API in the default config, which isn’t very much of a Google decoupling.

Roark66 33 minutes ago | parent

I run SearXNG (and Crawl4AI) for my self hosted librechat (self hosted chatgpt equivalent that can search, use Internet etc).

Duckduckgo.com and bing tend to respond well as well as Staan after an account is created with them.

But what we need is competition between few large search providers, because prices now are bonkers. The only large-ish search provider that doesn't just repackaged Google or Bing is Brave, but they charge $5 for 1k requests. That is just silly. 1k will not last more than two dozen uses (each chat fires off 10-20 searches).

damiante 7 minutes ago | parent

Do you really need a server implementation for this? Surely you could achieve this with a browser extension that grabs queries which begin with "!" and then has a mapping table of postfixes to query formats?