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SearXNG

SearXNG
open source / Overall score: 3.6

SearXNG 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
5.0
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.

Adoption

4 high confidence
4.0

SearXNG 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.

Capability

3 medium confidence
3.0

SearXNG 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