SearXNG

What is SearXNG?

SearXNG is a metasearch engine that queries other search engines on your behalf and merges their results into one page. It has no index of its own — instead it fans your query out to Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Wikipedia and up to 270 other services, strips the tracking in between, and hands you the combined results. It’s a maintained fork of the original searx, active since 2021.

What is SearXNG best for?

People who want ad-free, unpersonalized search without their queries being logged or turned into a profile — privacy-minded users, homelab operators, and teams that need a search backend they control. Because it exposes a JSON API, it’s also become a common way to give LLM agents and scripts programmatic web search without paying per query.

What can SearXNG do?

• Aggregate results from up to 270 search services across web, images, videos, news, maps, science, files, and code
• Return results with no tracking, no persistent cookies, and no user profiling
• Serve a JSON API so scripts, LLM agents, and apps can run searches programmatically
• Filter and weight which engines, categories, and languages answer each query, via bangs or settings.yml
• Proxy outbound requests (and run over Tor) so upstream engines see your server, not you
• Self-host with Docker or install directly with Python; the interface is localized in 58 languages

Where does SearXNG fall short?

• It has no index of its own, so it depends on scraping public engines. When Google or Bing rate-limit or CAPTCHA your instance — common on datacenter IPs — those results silently drop out until the traffic cools down.
• When an upstream engine changes its result format, that engine’s parser breaks until maintainers ship a fix, so individual sources can go dark between releases.
• Public instances vary in speed, uptime, and which engines actually work — and using one means trusting whoever runs it, which undercuts the privacy point unless you self-host.

Is SearXNG free?

Yes — SearXNG is fully free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license. There’s no paid tier and no managed cloud from the project; you either use one of the ~70 free public instances listed on searx.space or self-host and pay only for the server it runs on.

What does SearXNG replace?

SearXNG stands in as a private Google Search alternative (and a Bing one). It does the same job — search the web and show you results — but strips the ads, the query logging, and the personalized filter bubble, since the upstream engines see your instance rather than you.

FAQ

Is SearXNG open source? Yes. SearXNG is released under the AGPL-3.0 license, and the full source is on GitHub. It’s a community-maintained fork of the original searx project.

Can I self-host SearXNG for free? Yes. Self-hosting is free — you only pay for the server. A Docker image is the quickest path, and a Redis or Valkey instance backs the built-in rate limiter.

Is SearXNG a good Google alternative? For privacy, yes — no tracking, no profiling, no ads. The caveat is that upstream engines can rate-limit a busy instance, so a personal self-hosted instance usually works better than a crowded public one.

What do I need to run SearXNG? A server with Docker (or a Python environment), Redis/Valkey for the limiter, and a reverse proxy like NGINX or Caddy in front for a production deployment. Configuration lives in a single settings.yml.