SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine

Ohi, I'm the original creator of Searx, but due to the limitations of the metasearch concept I'm not involved in the development anymore. My new search project is https://github.com/asciimoo/hister (https://hister.org/).

Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. Storing full page content allows serving offline result previews and the full page content via MCP.

Take a look at how the MCP can be utilized: https://hister.org/posts/give-your-ai-assistant-a-private-me...

SearXNG is my daily internet search now +5 years; with YaCY Backends and else as fallback. I also build internal document search or RAG applications with this setup (SearXNG also support json results). However, there are some downer I accept because of privacy: 1. Its slower and the results are not that good then with others. But fast and good enough for most of my queries. 2. From time to time you get blocked on the duckduckgo, brave or whatever search and you must solve some captures. You can prevent this by getting and using API-Keys from them.

The nice thing about using your own backend is, that you can prio it in the results and for example, if I crawl the smallweb and other site important for myself, this sites come up first in the results.

This appears to be a key tool for providing search to local models.

I'm curious what setups folks use to provide this functionality.

Since the quantized 24B parameter Gemma model came out, I've had good luck with tool calling on a 4070 Ti Super.

Successful tool calling is what finally made the local experience useful.

I should note this is for the general and not coding specific context.

I've been self hosting this as my default engine across all of my searches for a few years now. I can't recommend it more highly.

TinySearch wraps this and works well for agents. It's better than the native SearXNG MCP because it optimizes the context before it even gets to the agent so as to not waste tokens.

https://github.com/MarcellM01/TinySearch

I've been using searxng for several years now. I don't run my own instances because the inhumane network censorship imposed by GFW, and proxy detection enforced by search engines. Instead, I rely on public instances on the list [1] and libredirect [2]. Note that service from a single instance is not guaranteed, but you can always switch to other available instances with little cost within a minute.

I won't say searxng can help you degoogle because metasearch engine calls other search engines, e.g., google, to collect results. However, if you try searxng, you can at least get rid of things like ai reviews in no time.

In the end, thank you people after searxng project and public instances.

[1] https://searx.space

[2] https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension

It works well if you connect it the Brave Search API, but using it a scraper is fairly unreliable. Google stopped working a few days ago.

Have used it in my homelab for the past 2 years, can recommend it. Easy to run in docker and helps both get better search results and keeps your search history local and in your control.

I've built https://github.com/denysvitali/searxng-mcp to use this as an MCP for coding agents. Works very well, until you get rate limited by the providers (e.g: DDG).

It also needs a SearXNG server to run, so I recently pivoted towards a self-contained solution: https://github.com/denysvitali/search-mcp

I’ve been a big fan of SearXNG for a while now. My distain for google has only grown, so having the ability to search and avoid things like yk, small AI models being installed on my PC without my consent, is awesome.

I’ve always liked this tool, but I’m of two minds regarding the privacy gained by sending my searches to 280 companies instead of just one.

I've been using SearXNG for a few years now, however I've been trying out Degoog as a SearXNG alternative since I've had issues with engines constantly failing or being slow since day 1 of using SearXNG, but Degoog has worse results with the same engines. It's a shame since I'm having to pick between slower but better results, or very fast but worse results.

I've been using this for some projects. It's exceptional and I recommend it highly.

I actually included a recipe to deploy it to kubernetes in typekro, my TypeScript infrastructure-as-code project for kubernetes: https://typekro.run/api/searxng/

Years of regular use here, has been great even before I started using it as an agent tool.

I have used SearXNG hosts like https://searx.be/ but stick with Brave search for the most part. Are there other good hosts people tend to use?

Been a fan of searX for a while. Not sure if this is the same thing but there were plenty of hosted versions too.

Yeah, I find that searx results are way more relevant to what I’m actually looking for than a single engine. There’s so much manipulation going on that if you don’t aggregate multiple engines, it’s near impossible to get what you want.

This is really great!

Friendly reminder that if your user and traffic count is low, your traffic is still unique and able to be profiled. Love and use this project, though.

searxng is fantastic for AI agents

Highly recommend this. I set up a self-hosted instance and been using it exclusively for months. It's better than DDG and i don't miss Google whatsoever.

Image search is worse i guess mostly for lack of CDN so it's slow but whatever.

I prefer 4get.

how do i configure which specific search engines SearXNG pulls its results from? Can we extend it to onyl search Stack Overflow and GitHub

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