The actively maintained successor to Searx. Self-hostable, open source metasearch engine. Users can access existing public instances.
Reviewed by Marcus Holmberg
SearXNG
searxng.org 4 ratings so far*
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Threat level
Hardened
A hardened pick. Worth the effort once you have chosen to shrink your footprint on purpose. Enough for most people. Threat levels
Our take
Self-hosting is where SearXNG truly pays off, because then no third party, not even a friendly instance operator, sees your queries; it aggregates results from many engines under your own roof. The catch is right there: running it takes effort, and the public instances, while convenient, mean trusting whoever runs them and can get rate-limited or blocked by upstream engines. Pick it if you’re technical enough to host your own and want metasearch with no middleman. Everyone else should treat public instances as a decent-but-not-ideal shortcut.
GitHub at a glance
searxng/searxng
Stars
33,921
+ 2,091 this week
Last commit
12d ago
healthy
License
AGPL-3.0
Stars, last 35d
Website at a glance
searxng.org
D score 30
Weak website security headers
Graded by Mozilla HTTP Observatory, tested 2d ago
Inspect this site yourself
Measures the security configuration of the tool's own website, not the privacy of the product itself. A strong tool can still score low here.
SearXNG alternatives
Brave Search Blog post about the new Brave Search beta . Based in the US. Launched in June 2021.
Mojeek A crawler-based search engine that provides independent search results using its own index of web pages, rather than using results from other search engines. Based in the UK.…
DuckDuckGo Privacy-focused search engine and mobile browser that blocks trackers and searches without profiling you. Partially open source, based in the US.
Startpage Obtains Google search results while protecting users' privacy. Based in the Netherlands. Launched in 1998.
Qwant French private search engine, EU-hosted, no personal data stored, blending its own index with Bing results.
Kagi Paid, ad-free search engine with no tracking, customizable result ranking, and a small free trial.
SearXNG license, in plain English
AGPL-3.0 Strong copyleft · network
Free to use, even commercially. Changes must be published under the same license, and running a modified version as a network service counts as distributing it.
Permits
- Commercial use
- Modification
- Distribution
- Patent use
- Private use
Requires
- Disclose source
- Network use is distribution
- Same license
- State changes
- License and copyright notice
Does not provide
- Liability cover
- Warranty
Why it matters: The network clause is the point. Anyone who runs a modified version as a hosted service has to publish those changes, so the code handling your data stays inspectable. This is why privacy-first projects reach for AGPL.
Plain-language summary of the project's license, not legal advice. Read the full text for the exact terms.
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