How to contribute

Prime directives: Privacy, Hackability

Searx has 2 prime directives, privacy-by-design and hackability. The hackability comes in at least 3 levels:

• support for search engines
• plugins for altering search behaviour
• hacking searx itself.

Happy hacking. Observe the lack of “world domination” among the directives, searx has no intentions for wide mass-adoption, rounded corners, etc. The prime directive: “privacy” - deserves a seperate chapter, as it’s quite uncommon unfortunately, here it goes:

Privacy-by-design

Searx is a privacy-respecting, hackable meta-search engine. It was born out of the need for a privacy-respecing search facility that can be expanded easily to maximise both its search and it’s privacy protecting capabilities.

Consequences of Privacy-by-design are that some widely used features work differently or not by default or at all. If some feature reduces the privacy perserving aspects of searx, it should by default be switched of, if implemented at all. There is enough search engines already out there providing such features. = Since privacy-preservation is a prime goal, if some feature does reduce the protection of searx and is implemented, care should be taken to educate the user about the consequences of choosing to enable this. Further features which implement widely known features in a manner that protects privacy but thus deviate from the users expectations should also be explained to the user. Also if you think that something works weird with searx, maybe it’s because of the tool you use is designed in a way to interfere with privacy respect, submiting a bugreport to the vendor of the tool that misbehaves might be a good feedback for the vendor to reconsider his disrespect towards his customers (e.g. GET vs POST requests in various browsers).

Remember the other prime directive of searx is to be hackable, so if the above privacy concerns do not fancy you, simply fork it.

Code

Code modifications are accepted in pull requests, don’t forget to add yourself to the AUTHORS file.

Python code follows all the pep8 standards except maximum line width which is 120 char.

Please be sure that the submitted code doesn’t break existing tests and follows coding conventions.

If new functionality implemented, tests are highly appreciated.

Translation

Translation currently happens on transifex. Please do not update translation files in the repo.

Documentation

The main place of the documentation is this wiki, updates are welcome.