Welcome back, my geeks, how are you? Well, have you ever thought, why is the default thing to search on the web is Google, why? Yes, Google is the most popular search engine, but there are many more out there like Bing, Duck Duck Go, Shodan, and many more. I will also come up with a post regarding the difference and pros and cons of Google and Duck Duck Go in the future, but for now, let’s concentrate on this.
So, what is a search engine? In laymen terms, the Search Engine is a software system that is designed to carry out a web search. But now you will say,” Hey! How could this be possible? Afterall Google is such a large company”, Yes sure it is but the search engine thing is not a proprietary product of Google. So now, I’ll tell you how to make one.
In this tutorial, we are using “Searx” by which we can make a secure search engine on the local host to browse the web securely on your localhost. In this one, I am using Kali Linux (a Linux distribution designed for pen-testing).
How to make your Search Engine?
Go to this link and copy the URL.
Open up a terminal and change directory to Desktop if you want, by typing: cd Desktop.
Now type: git clone https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
Now type cd searx (make sure you are in the same directory in which searx has been cloned).
Type: ls
Now update the packages and dependicies by typing: ./manage.sh update_packages.
Now it will install the required packages, wait for a while.
Now type: python searx/webapp.py
Open this link on your Browser.
Ignore the Python2 warning, now let’s see what’s our search engine looks like
Yeah! It looks nice, now let’s search for some social influencers, the best of the best.
Here are the results, as you can see the results are from google and bing as they are indexed there. Now you can play with it further.
Bingo! Here is our search engine, we can use it as our search engine, Now you can securely browse and search the web, basically it is not on the internet, that’s the thing, it is in our localhost. So, enjoy the searching, till then “Keep Learning”.
