Product / UX / Agent tools & protocols

SearXNG

Privacy-respecting metasearch engine that aggregates results from many search services without tracking or profiling users. It predates the LLM era and does no inference itself, but exposes a JSON API and runs entirely on infrastructure you operate, which is why answer engines and RAG stacks use it as a web-search backend - Open WebUI, Perplexica, Morphic and LibreChat all integrate it as a provider.

Community-run fork-successor of the older searx project. There is no hosted service; it is distributed for self-hosting alongside a network of community public instances, many of which disable the JSON API. Docker is not a declared artifact here, so the adoption figure is computed in the score note rather than fetched by a signal. Verified 2026-08-13 via GitHub, Docker Hub and the SearXNG search-API documentation.

Openness

5 high confidence

5.0

license: AGPL-3.0(OSI)
source: public(github.com/searxng/searxng)
self-host: only(no official SaaS)
core-gated: ungated

Fully open source under copyleft AGPL-3.0, complete source public, reproducible official Docker image, no proprietary backend or gated hosted tier - self-hosting (or community public instances) is the only distribution.

https://github.com/searxng/searxng recorded 2026-08-13
"This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL-3.0)"; repo metadata spdxId AGPL-3.0, "GNU Affero General Public License v3.0"; 35,415 stargazers. Root tree carries searx/, searxng_extra/, client/simple, container/, docs/, tests/, utils/ and one LICENSE. No paid tier, hosted service or enterprise directory.

Adoption

4 high confidence

4.0

Around 32,000 GitHub stars, roughly 70 maintained public instances and Docker pull volume well into the high band - concrete deployment volume rather than stars alone. SearXNG is the de facto open web-search backend for self-hosted AI. The band comes from the Docker Hub payload for searxng/searxng, which reports 71,581,974 pulls since the repository was registered; across the 63.70 months since then that averages 1,123,660 pulls a month, landing in 1M-10M at level 4. A cumulative total is not directly comparable with any other record on this scale, since the axis is monthly, so the figure is treated as a declared floor: a lifetime average understates a growing product, and SearXNG's pull rate is not flat. Docker is not one of this product's declared artifacts, so the figure lives in this note rather than in a recorded signal.

https://hub.docker.com/r/searxng/searxng recorded 2026-08-13
Official image searxng/searxng. Repository payload gives pull_count 71,581,974, star_count 186, status active, date_registered 2021-04-22.

Capability

4 medium confidence

4.0

The reference open implementation of the search-backend slot - broad source aggregation, clean structured JSON, fully self-hosted. Below top among AI search APIs because it is raw metasearch without the AI-native extraction/reranking that proprietary peers (Tavily/Exa) layer on.

https://docs.searxng.org/dev/search_api.html recorded 2026-08-13
Endpoints GET / , GET /search , POST / , POST /search with `?format=json` and `format=csv` examples. "Be aware that many public instances have these formats disabled" and will return 403. Engine roster is a separate Configured Engines page. NOT on this page: any count of aggregated search services, 269 or otherwise. Docs build 2026.8.13.

Verified 2026-08-13