I wanted to share a personal update with the community: I have shifted my active development focus away from this project to a new search tool I have been building called Hister.
Searx is a metasearch engine, which means it is fundamentally dependent on third-party search engines. This creates inherent limitations that are difficult to solve within the current architecture:
- Results are only as good as what upstream engines expose
- Privacy guarantees are partial because requests still leave your machine
- Relevance ranking is limited to what scraped results provide
- There is no persistent memory of what you have already read or found useful
Hister takes a different approach. Instead of querying other engines, it indexes content you choose (web pages, local files, browser history) into a fully local, self-hosted full-text search index. This eliminates most of the conceptual weaknesses that come with being a metasearch engine while giving you complete control over your data.
I still believe searx was a worthwhile project and I am grateful for everyone who contributed and used it.
If the ideas behind searx resonate with you, I invite you to take a look at Hister. It may address things you always wanted from a personal search tool.
Searx is no longer maintained. Thank you for your support and all your contributions.
Privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine / pronunciation sɜːks.
If you are looking for running instances, ready to use, then visit searx.space.
Otherwise jump to the user, admin and developer handbooks you will find on our homepage.
No, searx is no longer maintained.
TL;DR: SearXNG is for users that want more features and bugs getting fixed quicker. If you prefer a minimalist software and stable experience, use searx.
SearxNG is a fork of searx, created by a former maintainer of searx. The fork was created because the majority of the maintainers at the time did not find the new proposed features privacy respecting enough. The most significant issue is with engine metrics.
Searx is built for privacy conscious users. It comes with a unique set of challenges. One of the problems we face is that users rather not report bugs, because they do not want to publicly share what engines they use or what search query triggered a problem. It is a challenge we accepted.
The new metrics feature collects more information to make engine maintenance easier. We could have had better and more error reports to benefit searx maintainers. However, we believe that the users of searx must come first, not the software. We are willing to compromise on the lack of issue reports to avoid violating the privacy of users.
Furthermore, SearxNG is under heavy refactoring and dependencies are constantly updated, even if it is unnecessary. It increases the risk of introducing regressions. In searx we strive for stability, rather than moving fast and breaking things.
Are you privacy conscious user? Then yes.
In searx we decided to double down on being privacy respecting. We are picking engine changes from SearxNG, but we are not implementing engine detailed monitoring and not adding a new UI that relies on Javascript.
If you are willing to give up some privacy respecting features, we encourage you to adopt SearxNG. Searx is targeted for privacy conscious users who run their instances locally, instead of using public instances.
SearxNG has rolling releases, dependencies updated more frequently, and engines are fixed faster. It is easy to set up your own public instance, and monitor its performance and metrics. It is simple to maintain as an instance administrator.
As a user, it provides a prettier user interface and nicer experience.