Posted on 2023-09-02
Quick one today. I got sick of searching for programming questions and seeing AI-generated scraped-from-stackoverflow click farm trash polluting the results, and I happen to use a personal SearXNG instance that no client-side blacklist extension on the planet is gonna support, so I went looking to see if I could blacklist them in SearXNG for like the eighth time and finally found a way using the hostname replace plugin. So here's that, because I didn't find this feature documented officially anywhere bar an issue on the Github repo.
First, open up your instance's config file. If you installed it directly like I did, that'll probably be /etc/searxng/settings.yml. If you used Docker, god help you. Anyway, find the enabled_plugins: section and uncomment the entry for 'Hostname replace', then uncomment the line hostname_replace: just below it. Under there you'll put your blocks:
/etc/searxng/settings.yml
enabled_plugins:
- 'Hostname replace'
hostname_replace:
'(.*\.)?codegrepper\.com': false
'(.*\.)?geeksforgeeks\.org': false
Then restart SearXNG:
$ service uwsgi restart searxng