36.6k stars · AGPL-3.0 · no tagged releases; 9,678 commits on master; rolling Docker images · Track this in Scout
Self-hosted metasearch engine, considered as a way to get rank-tracking data without paying for a SERP API.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
SearXNG is a metasearch engine: it forwards a query to a configurable set of upstream engines, merges and ranks what comes back, and shows it with no tracking. It runs as a Python application, normally in a container behind a reverse proxy.
What it is good for. Anyone who wants search results without a profile being built, and anyone who wants one box that searches several specialised sources at once — code, academic papers, maps and images can all be in the same query. It is also a way to give a household or a small team a private default search page.
- No logging, no cookies of consequence, no account. The person running it decides what is kept, and the sensible answer is nothing.
- Well over a hundred upstream sources, switchable per category, so a single query can cover general web, code repositories and academic papers.
- It can be set as the browser's default search engine and supports the
!bangshortcuts people know from elsewhere.
- The upstream engines rate-limit, show CAPTCHAs to, and block self-hosted copies. Results degrade in ways the operator cannot fix, and the honest expectation is that some engines will be silently unavailable on any given day.
- No tagged releases at all — we looked, and there are none. Installation follows a rolling container image, so pinning a known-good version means pinning an image digest.
- Using it to collect search-ranking data at scale is fragile and against the search engines' terms of service. As a private search page it is fine; as a data source underneath something else it is not.
- searx/searx
13,553 stars, the original project that SearXNG was forked from; its last code landed on 14 May 2026 and it moves far more slowly than the fork.
Track this in Scout - benbusby/whoogle-search
11,598 stars, passes queries to Google alone and strips the tracking; simpler and more consistent, and dependent on one upstream.
Track this in Scout - mwmbl/mwmbl
1,830 stars, a non-profit search engine that crawls the web itself instead of asking others; a very different bet, with a far smaller index.
Track this in Scout
mkdir -p ~/searxng && cd ~/searxng
docker run -d --name searxng \
-p 8080:8080 \
-v "${PWD}/searxng:/etc/searxng" \
-e "BASE_URL=http://localhost:8080/" \
--restart unless-stopped \
searxng/searxng:latest