SearXNG
SearXNGSearXNG is a privacy-respecting metasearch engine that aggregates results from many search services without tracking or profiling users, and a community-run successor to the older searx project. It predates the LLM era and does no inference itself, but exposes a JSON API and runs on self-hosted infrastructure. Answer engines and RAG stacks such as Open WebUI, Perplexica, Morphic and LibreChat integrate it as a web-search provider.
Openness
5 high confidence- license
- AGPL-3.0(OSI)
- source
- public(github.com/searxng/searxng)
- self-host
- only(no official SaaS)
- core features withheld
- no
The whole project is published under AGPL-3.0 in a public repository, and its README describes a single product with no paid, hosted or enterprise edition. Nothing is withheld from the published source, so running it yourself or using a community-run instance is the only way to use it.
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/searxng/searxng/master/LICENSE recorded 2026-09-28
GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/searxng/searxng/master/README.rst recorded 2026-09-28
This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL-3.0).
Adoption
4 high confidenceSearXNG has no download or install channel of its own, so adoption is measured from Docker Hub's pull count for the official searxng/searxng image, averaged over the time since the repository was registered. That average is treated as a floor rather than a precise rate, because a lifetime total understates a growing product whose pull rate has not been flat.
- https://hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/searxng/searxng recorded 2026-09-28
"pull_count":86964546
Capability
3 medium confidenceSearXNG aggregates other engines and returns their references without fetching the page content itself, which keeps it level with Serper rather than a step higher. Its Answer result type simply forwards an instant answer from an upstream engine rather than composing a reply from retrieved sources.
- https://docs.searxng.org/dev/search_api.html recorded 2026-09-17
The search API: endpoints `GET /`, `GET /search`, `POST /`, `POST /search`, with `curl 'https://searx.example.org/search?q=searxng&format=json'` and the json, csv and rss formats. Result types are Main Results, Key-Value, Code, Paper, File, Image, Answer, Correction, Suggestion and Infobox - all shapes of a results page.
Verified 2026-09-17