The actively maintained successor to Searx. Self-hostable, open source metasearch engine. Users can access existing public instances.
SearXNG
Official website searxng.org
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
32,396
+ 566 this week
Last commit
1d ago
healthy
License
AGPL-3.0
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SearXNG alternatives
Startpage Obtains Google search results while protecting users' privacy. Based in the Netherlands. Launched in 1998.
Brave Search Blog post about the new Brave Search beta . Based in the US. Launched in June 2021.
MetaGer Link: MetaGer on GitLab . Based in Germany. Launched in 1996.
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. Blocks trackers, forces encrypted connections, and does not profile you. Partially open-source, based in the US.
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.