SearXNG is a metasearch engine. A person or a program sends one query to your instance. The instance asks several other search services and returns a combined page. The README states the privacy rule in one sentence. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. The license is AGPL-3.0. The docs home is docs.searxng.org.
Checked 3 November 2026 against the README on master, the GitHub API, and the docs. The docs pages carry the version stamp 2026.11.2+cccbc9e15. SearXNG was not installed and no query was sent.
Repository
The GitHub API for searxng/searxng returned these values on 3 November 2026. The repo is public and not archived. Language is Python. Default branch is master. Created 12 April 2021. Last push 2 November 2026 at 17:41 UTC. Stars 39,141. Forks 3,572. Open issues 207. Homepage https://docs.searxng.org. License SPDX AGPL-3.0.
The README points installers at the installation guide and the settings guide. Questions go to the Matrix room #searxng:matrix.org. Translations are on Weblate at translate.codeberg.org.
How an instance is put together
The install nav offers three paths. A container, an installation script, and a step-by-step install. The app servers named in that nav are Granian and uWSGI, behind NGINX or Apache.
Settings load from the first file that exists and can be read. The path in SEARXNG_SETTINGS_PATH, then /etc/searxng/settings.yml, then the copy shipped in the repo. A short file can set use_default_settings: true and override one key. Engine lists merge by engine name, so a config can add an engine, drop one, or keep only a named set. The sample secret in the docs is the string ultrasecretkey. Replace it. SEARXNG_SECRET overwrites the secret, and SEARXNG_BASE_URL overwrites the public URL.
The reference layout for a public instance uses Valkey. The sample URL is valkey://localhost:6379/0, and SEARXNG_VALKEY_URL overwrites it. The settings nav still has a redis: section next to valkey:. This note does not say the Redis section is gone.
The docs have a page titled "Answer CAPTCHA from server's IP." Upstream engines challenge the instance's address. That page was not read, so this note does not describe the workaround. There is also a user page titled "Why use a private instance?" That argument was not read. Public instances are a documented setup, not an accident.
What it can query
SearXNG does not crawl the web itself. An engine is a module that calls someone else's search and maps the response. The docs nav lists engines for Brave, Exa, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, Startpage, Qwant, Yandex, Kagi, Marginalia, and Mwmbl, plus academic and code sources such as arXiv, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, GitHub, and GitLab. That list is a sample of the nav, not a count. Turning an engine on does not give you that vendor's API terms. An Exa engine still needs an Exa key. A Brave engine still needs whatever Brave requires of that integration.
Result types in the docs nav include the main result, key-value, code, paper, file, image, video, answer, correction, suggestion, and infobox. Built-in plugins named in the nav include a calculator, hash values, hostnames, infinite scroll, self-info, a Tor check, a unit converter, and a time zone. Built-in answerers named there are random, statistics, and translation. There is a Search API page for callers that want JSON instead of HTML. Its schema was not copied here.
See also: Brave AI · Exa · Data Tools