Search engines know a lot about us.

Not because we tell them everything directly, but because search is where we type the weirdly specific stuff. Errors we are debugging. Health doubts. Product research. Travel plans. Work problems. Random questions we would never post publicly.

That is why I started using 4get.

4get is a self-hosted proxy search engine. It does not replace Google completely. It does not crawl the whole web or build its own search index. Instead, it sits in the middle, asks other search engines for results, and shows them back in a cleaner, lighter page.

The project describes itself as a privacy-oriented, ad-free, lightweight way to search the web with minimal optional JavaScript.

what 4get actually does

Think of 4get as a private front desk for search.

Normally, your browser talks directly to a search engine.

With 4get, your browser talks to your 4get instance first. Then 4get fetches results from search engines and shows them to you.

That is what makes it a proxy. A proxy is just something that sits between you and another service. It receives your request, forwards it, and returns the response.

This is important: 4get is not magic privacy dust.

Your query still has to go to the search source 4get is using. Otherwise, it cannot get results. But you get a cleaner layer in between, fewer tracking-heavy links, less clutter, and more control over your own search page.

On the public 4get instance, the project says it does not log IP addresses or user agents, and only stores temporary encrypted data for next-page results.

why it is useful

4get is useful because it keeps search simple.

No bloated page.
No heavy interface.
No ads taking over the screen.
No random distractions before the actual results.

It supports web, images, videos, news, music, and autocomplete. The project also includes features like search filters, an image proxy, favicon fetching, optional bot protection, and support for different upstream sources.

The best part is that it fits the self-hosted mindset properly.

You are not trying to rebuild the entire internet. You are just taking one thing you use often and putting a cleaner, more private layer in front of it.

That is enough.

how to set it up

The easiest way to run 4get is with Docker.

The official Docker docs say 4get supports environment variables prefixed with FOURGET_. A basic Compose setup looks like this:

version: "3.7"

services:
  fourget:
    image: luuul/4get:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - FOURGET_PROTO=http
      - FOURGET_SERVER_NAME=search.example.com
    ports:
      - "80:80"

Start it with:

docker compose up -d

You can expose it through your reverse proxy, put it behind access control, or run it on a private domain. If you want HTTPS inside the container, the docs also show certificate mounting support.

set it as your default search

This is the part that makes it useful.

Do not just deploy it and forget about it. Add it as your browser’s default search engine.

For Chromium-based browsers, the search URL format is:

https://your-domain.com/web?s=%s

Replace your-domain.com with your 4get domain.

Firefox can also add it from the address bar and then select it in search settings.

final thought

4get is not a full Google replacement.

It is a proxy search engine. It sits between you and other search engines, cleans up the experience, and gives you a search page that feels lighter and more private.

That is the whole point.

You do not need every self-hosted app to be revolutionary. Sometimes the best ones are small tools that remove one annoying part of the internet.

My browser now defaults to search.harshalranjhani.in, which sounds unreasonable until you realize it works surprisingly well.