Not sure if it’s what you’re looking for, but lirc has a database. Instructions for contributing files can be found here, files should adhere to the checklist here.

I noted in another comment that SearXNG can’t do anything about the trackers that your browser can’t do, and solving this at the browser level is a much better solution, because it protects you everywhere, rather than just on the search engine.

Routing over Tor is similar. Yes, you can route the search from your SearXNG instance to Google (or whatever upstream engine) over Tor, and hide your identity from Google. But then you click a link, and your IP connects to the IP of whatever site the results link to, and your ISP sees that. Knowing where you land can tell your ISP a lot about what you searched for. And the site you connected to knows your IP, so they get even more information - they know every action you took on the site, and everything you viewed. If you want to protect all of that, you should just use Tor on your computer, and protect every connection.

This is the same argument for using Signal vs WhatsApp - yes, in WhatsApp the conversation may be E2E encrypted, but the metadata about who you’re chatting with, for how long, etc is all still very valuable to Meta.

To reiterate/clarify what I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not making the case that people shouldn’t use SearXNG at all, only that their privacy claims are overstated, and if your goal is privacy, all the levels of security you would apply to SearXNG should be applied at your device level: Use a browser/extension to block trackers, use Tor to protect all your traffic, etc.

They are explicitly trying to move away from Google, and are looking for a new option because their current solution is forcing them to turn off ad-blocking. Sounds to me like they are looking for a private option. Plus, given the forum in which we are having the discussion (Lemmy), even if OP is not specifically concerned with privacy, it seems likely other users are.

As for cookies, searxng can’t do any more than your browser (possibly with extensions) can do, and relying on your browser here is a much better solution, because it protects you on all sites, rather than just on your chosen search engine.

“Trash mountain” results is a whole separate issue - you can certainly tune the results to your liking. But literally the second sentence of their GitHub headline is touting no tracking or profiling, so it seems worth bringing attention to the limitations, and that’s all I’m trying to do here.

You mean between their instance and the final search engines? Or between them and a public instance of searxng?

In either case, I’m not sure it buys you anything in terms of privacy you wouldn’t get by using the VPN and going directly to the search engines.

It looks like a few people are recommending this, so just a quick note in case people are unaware:

If you want to avoid being tracked, this is not a good solution. Searxng is a meta search engine, meaning it is effectively a proxy: you search on Searxng, it searches multiple sites and sends all the results back to you. If you use a public instance, you may be protected from the actual search engine*, because many people will use the same instance, and your queries will be mixed in with all of them. If you self host, however, all the searches will be your own - there is then no difference between using Searxng and just going to the site yourself.

*The caveat with using the public instances is while you may be protected from the upstream engine, you have to trust the admins - nothing stops them from tracking you themselves (or passing your data on).

Despite the claims in their docs, I would not consider this a privacy tool. If you are just looking for a good search engine, this may work, and it gives you flexibility and power to tune it yourself. But it’s probably not going to do anything good for your privacy, above and beyond what you can get from other meta search engines like Startpage and DuckDuckGo, or other “private” search engines like Brave.

The community forked the core a while back: https://github.com/openVoiceOS/

See also https://neon.ai/, which builds on top of OVOS, and is who the Mycroft company officially passed the reigns to.

If they do not have cell service, they won’t be able to set up Signal, or any other service that requires a phone number (they won’t be able to receive the text message that verifies they own the number).

You might be referring to this? That’s what I found from a quick search, at least.

If I understand correctly, this is a little different - from what I recall reading a few years ago, the speculation was that Netflix (and similar apps) rendered the content directly, bypassing the normal rendering stack. It would be the equivalent of, on a Linux system, bypassing the compositor (e.g. Mutter or KWin), and directly rendering the content (I believe SurfaceFlinger is the Android compositor). This means that when something like scrcpy uses the competitor API to capture the content, the content is literally not there, because it bypassed that system altogether.

By contrast, the secure flag just allows app developers to ask the OS to disallow screenshots, to prevent data leakage (e.g. of your banking details). It’s all rendered in the standard way, though.

This may not be accurate - it’s based on assumptions, and forum posts I read years ago, but it’s the best explanation I have right now. If anyone knows better, please feel free to correct me.

It’s not exactly what you’re looking for, and won’t be as seamless, but you might be able to leverage scrcpy.

It uses adb (you may need a fullfat distro for this - lineage may not support it), and allows you to view and control your Android device from a computer. It can also handle audio, and can be used wirelessly. The one caveat is protected content will probably not show up in the mirror - e.g. if you cast your screen and try to stream Netflix, it will likely be unable to send the Netflix video over. The last time I tested, it depended on the specific app, and which APIs they used under the hood (at the time, YouTube worked, Netflix did not).

I would imagine the source for most projects is hosted on GitHub, or similar platforms? Perhaps you could consider forks, stars, and followers as “votes” and sort each sub category based on the votes. I would imagine that would be scriptable - the script could be included in the awesome list repo, and run periodically. It would be kind of interesting to tag “releases” and see how the sort order changes over time. If you wanted to get fancy, the sorting could probably happen as part of a CI task.

If workable, the obvious benefit is you don’t have to exclude anything for subjective reasons, but it’s easier for readers of the list to quickly find the “most used” options.

Just an idea off the top of my head. You may have already thought about it, and/or it may be full of holes.