Birbla

Discussion summary

SearXNG is a customizable, open-source metasearch engine with various hosting options and user preferences. Users discuss configuring search sources, hosting, and alternatives like Brave Search and uruky.

What the discussion says

  • Users want to customize search engines, e.g., only Stack Overflow and GitHub.
  • Some prefer self-hosting for control and privacy.
  • Alternatives like uruky and Brave Search are mentioned.
  • Concerns about search result quality and reliability.
“How do I configure which search engines SearXNG pulls from?”
— noobcoder
“I prefer 4get.”
— salmonik

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  • Hacker News
  • 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/

    by ManWith2Plans
  • 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.
    by chatmasta
  • 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.
    by fishgoesblub
  • 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

    by denysvitali
  • I built something similar ([1]) that you might find interesting. Similar to your project, but with the fun tweak that it bundles searxng inside itself, so you don't need to run or find a searxng instance to use it.

    [1]: https://github.com/nikvdp/searxng-ai-kit

    by nikvdp
  • 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.
    by ninjahawk1
  • 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.
    by artooro
  • 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

    by satvikpendem
  • Props
    by ProofHouse
  • SearXNG did not include a built-in MCP server, last time I checked.
    by drnick1
  • 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

    by RandyOrion
  • The thing about the public instances, is now you often have to go through a lot of them to verify they work properly. SearXNG needs better quality control.

    Often have to go through the preferences to deselect search engines that don't work (often because of the instance being blocked) or select those that do work, because of reliability problems. Which engines are working, can be different for each public instance, so that even saving a preference hash doesn't always work.

    Would be great if SearXNG did automatic adjustment of presented search engines (or offered the option) based on reliability.

    by baranul
  • 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.
    by dexterdog
  • Same experience
    by viviansolide
  • I’ll have to try, I’ve only recently learned Exa pricing is a bit crazy (especially on searches where you source 30-40 sources)I just used it be default and then was like oh damn when I got hit
    by ProofHouse
  • 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.

    by exiguus
  • > SearXNG is my daily internet search now +5 years

    Same here

    > with YaCY Backends and else as fallback.

    Do you run your own "super fast" YaCy instance? or with specific settings?

    My experience with YaCy is it doesn't fit in the backend of SearX since YaCy kind of slowly stream results for about 30 seconds...

    I also have a local `kiwix-serve` serving ZIM files of wikipedia, wiktionary, gutemberg, archwiki, etc. but same problem the kiwix search engine [0] doesn't really fit as a backend for SearX as it returns too many results and pollute the SearX result page.

    What I haven't done yet is trying to plug SearX to a local Recoll instance [1]. But Recoll doesn't support indexing ZIM files... but could be useful for other archived html documents.

    I would be curious to know more about a working setup since search is hard to get right.

    - [0] https://kiwix-tools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/kiwix-serve.htm...

    - [1] https://docs.searxng.org/dev/engines/online/recoll.html

    by sunshine-o
  • 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.

    by goodroot
  • are you running a quant?

    i have a friend with a 4080 that is wanting to experiment with local models and those cards should be similar enough. can you give any more detail about your setup? ty!

    by jared0x90
  • TinySearch MCP. If you use Unsloth Studio however it simply calls DuckDuckGo's HTML API instead and works pretty well.
    by satvikpendem
  • I am also interested in what a full local AI stack with web search and other tools looks like. As far as I can tell, SearX does not embed an MCP server, so it can't be directly called from llama-server for example. Open WebUI does have an integration for SearX and other providers, but the results I obtained weren't particularly impressive.
    by drnick1
  • It has a JSON mode that you need to enable in settings and then you can create a simple python script to interact with it or have the agent use `curl` and `jq` to interact with it.

    It's at the bottom of this page: https://docs.searxng.org/admin/settings/settings_search.html

    by gardnr
  • 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...

    by asciimoo
  • Interesting, a local search option. I made the recoll engine for SearX and now SearXNG and still use this daily over a rather large archive of journal articles and other non-fiction texts. Recoll's indexer can extract text from just about anything I throw at it, it also extracts and indexes metadata. Would Hister serve the same purpose and if so is there a SearXNG engine to integrate it into the result stream?
    by Leonard_of_Q
  • YaCY has a proxy mode that automatically index your web-serving. In my experience, the index grow in size very fast and reaches ~100GB or more. How does the index size of Hister compare to that?
    by exiguus
  • I also use my own, lets say search engine.

    I download only title, description, thumbnail, common og fields.

    My index is very lean, I think. I have 2m of pages crawled.

    https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

    It has tags, and votes support.

    Recently I also launched my first fdroid app

    https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch

    https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.rumcajs.offlineweb...

    by renegat0x0
  • I was considering paying someone to build something like this at some point. With two jobs, I eventually had no time to even organize what I find. It's just piles of links in text files.

    Can I give your software a huge list of URL's to index? Or do I need to use browser automation to open them a few at a time with it caching and indexing them?

    by nickpsecurity
  • Looks good, but was also curious about the "limitations of the metasearch concept," could you explain this more?
    by satvikpendem
  • Hister sounds like something I wanted for a while, but never got around to building. Searching stuff I’ve seen before is most of what I do with a search engine, so having it local and fast would be amazing. Eager to give it a try.
    by ydj
  • I'm sorry for not taking the time to read the docs, but I have a question.

    Some 20 years ago a friend of mine has set up a local proxy (python if I'm not mistaken) that was gathering all his web traffic and served him as a long term memory. The proxy had a web interface and allowed him to quickly find something he saw ca. 10 days ago, or that specific algorithm he recalls but can't remember it's name.

    For years I've been collecting links to different work related trivia which I use on a daily basis as a rabbit-from-a-hat solution to answer random question from friends and coworkers. For example someone randomly asked me for an idea for color palette for data charts and I can immediately give them a scientific research into the color palette. Or an obscure algorithm.

    But with time the collection has grown substantially and it's really cumbersome to find the proper things.

    Would your project be a good fit for my problem?

    by zeroq