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SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine

95 pointsby theanonymousonetoday at 8:15 PM23 commentsview on HN

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asciimootoday at 10:37 PM

Ohi, I'm the original creator of Searx, but due to the limitations of the metasearch concept I'm not involved in the development anymore. My new search project is https://github.com/asciimoo/hister (https://hister.org/).

Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. Storing full page content allows serving offline result previews and the full page content via MCP.

Take a look at how the MCP can be utilized: https://hister.org/posts/give-your-ai-assistant-a-private-me...

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exiguustoday at 10:47 PM

SearXNG is my daily internet search now +5 years; with YaCY Backends and else as fallback. I also build internal document search or RAG applications with this setup (SearXNG also support json results). However, there are some downer I accept because of privacy: 1. Its slower and the results are not that good then with others. But fast and good enough for most of my queries. 2. From time to time you get blocked on the duckduckgo, brave or whatever search and you must solve some captures. You can prevent this by getting and using API-Keys from them.

The nice thing about using your own backend is, that you can prio it in the results and for example, if I crawl the smallweb and other site important for myself, this sites come up first in the results.

satvikpendemtoday at 9:06 PM

TinySearch wraps this and works well for agents. It's better than the native SearXNG MCP because it optimizes the context before it even gets to the agent so as to not waste tokens.

https://github.com/MarcellM01/TinySearch

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goodroottoday at 10:31 PM

This appears to be a key tool for providing search to local models.

I'm curious what setups folks use to provide this functionality.

Since the quantized 24B parameter Gemma model came out, I've had good luck with tool calling on a 4070 Ti Super.

Successful tool calling is what finally made the local experience useful.

I should note this is for the general and not coding specific context.

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artoorotoday at 9:42 PM

It works well if you connect it the Brave Search API, but using it a scraper is fairly unreliable. Google stopped working a few days ago.

fishgoesblubtoday at 9:51 PM

I've been using SearXNG for a few years now, however I've been trying out Degoog as a SearXNG alternative since I've had issues with engines constantly failing or being slow since day 1 of using SearXNG, but Degoog has worse results with the same engines. It's a shame since I'm having to pick between slower but better results, or very fast but worse results.

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ManWith2Planstoday at 9:16 PM

I've been using this for some projects. It's exceptional and I recommend it highly.

I actually included a recipe to deploy it to kubernetes in typekro, my TypeScript infrastructure-as-code project for kubernetes: https://typekro.run/api/searxng/

dexterdogtoday at 9:09 PM

I've been self hosting this as my default engine across all of my searches for a few years now. I can't recommend it more highly.

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arikrahmantoday at 9:20 PM

I have used SearXNG hosts like https://searx.be/ but stick with Brave search for the most part. Are there other good hosts people tend to use?

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lucasrufkahrtoday at 10:19 PM

Yeah, I find that searx results are way more relevant to what I’m actually looking for than a single engine. There’s so much manipulation going on that if you don’t aggregate multiple engines, it’s near impossible to get what you want.

rcarmotoday at 10:15 PM

Years of regular use here, has been great even before I started using it as an agent tool.

another_twisttoday at 9:29 PM

Been a fan of searX for a while. Not sure if this is the same thing but there were plenty of hosted versions too.

salmoniktoday at 9:25 PM

I prefer 4get.

noobcodertoday at 10:00 PM

how do i configure which specific search engines SearXNG pulls its results from? Can we extend it to onyl search Stack Overflow and GitHub

tosieftoday at 11:13 PM

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tomfowtoday at 9:24 PM

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tom6owtoday at 9:44 PM

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tomnowtoday at 9:11 PM

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