SearXNG: Open-Source Metasearch Engine and Your Site

SearXNG is free, open-source metasearch software. A metasearch engine sends your query to other search engines and combines their results. SearXNG has no index and no crawler of its own, so your site shows in SearXNG only when the engines behind it show your site.

What SearXNG is

The SearXNG documentation describes it as a free internet metasearch engine that combines results from up to 261 search services. The code is on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license.

Anyone can run an instance. An instance is one server that runs SearXNG. The searx.space site lists public instances. The admin of each instance selects the engines that the instance uses, in its settings.yml file.

The documentation says that SearXNG does not track or profile its users. The page about running your own instance gives the details. SearXNG sends no cookies to the external search engines, and the engines see the IP address of the instance, not of the user.

How SearXNG gets its results

SearXNG does not crawl the web. For each query, the instance sends requests to the engines that its admin enabled. Examples are DuckDuckGo, Brave, Wikipedia, Google and Bing. SearXNG then merges the result lists into one page. The list of configured engines shows the engines in the default settings.

There is no SearXNG index, so there is no place to submit a site. If you want your pages to show in SearXNG, make sure that the engines behind it index your pages. For the crawlers of these engines, see Googlebot, Bingbot and Bravebot.

What a site owner can control

• SearXNG documents no crawler and no user agent of its own. There is no SearXNG token to use in robots.txt.
• If you want a page out of SearXNG results, remove it from the engines that SearXNG queries. For Google and Bing, a noindex meta robots tag does this.
• SearXNG hides the referring page from the sites that its users visit. Visits from SearXNG can show in your analytics with no referrer.
• An instance can proxy images with the image_proxy setting (server settings). If an instance uses it, the instance server fetches your images, not the browser of the user.