Searx (; stylized as searX) is a discontinued free and

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

metasearch engine A metasearch engine (or search aggregator) is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. ...

, available under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, with the aim of protecting the

privacy Privacy (, ) is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. The domain of privacy partially overlaps with security, which can include the concepts of a ...

of its users. To this end, Searx does not share users'

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface i ...

es or search history with the

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

s from which it gathers results. Tracking cookies served by the search engines are blocked, preventing user-profiling-based results modification. By default, Searx queries are submitted via

HTTP POST In computing, POST is a request method supported by HTTP used by the World Wide Web. By design, the POST request method requests that a web server accepts the data enclosed in the body of the request message, most likely for storing it. It is o ...

, to prevent users' query keywords from appearing in webserver logs. Searx was inspired by the Seeks project, though it does not implement Seeks'

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node ...

user-sourced results

ranking A ranking is a relationship between a set of items, often recorded in a list, such that, for any two items, the first is either "ranked higher than", "ranked lower than", or "ranked equal to" the second. In mathematics, this is known as a weak ...

. Each search result is given as a direct link to the respective site, rather than a tracked redirect link as used by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

. In addition, when available, these direct links are accompanied by cached and/or proxied links that allow viewing results pages without actually visiting the sites in question. The cached links point to saved versions of a page on the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in ...

, while the proxied links allow viewing the current live page via a Searx-based web proxy. In addition to the general search, the engine also features tabs to search within specific domains: files, images,

Information technology Information technology (IT) is a set of related fields within information and communications technology (ICT), that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages, data processing, data and information processing, and storage. Inf ...

, maps, music, news, science, social media, and videos. Users can run private instances of Searx on their own computer, but there are also many public, user-run, Searx instances, some of which are available as

Tor Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to: Places * Toronto, Canada ** Toronto Raptors * Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain * Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city * Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano * Tor Bay, Devon, England * Tor ...

hidden services. Meta-Searx instances can also be used to forward the search query to a random public instance. A public

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

is available for Searx, as well as

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

search provider plugins. As of 7 September 2023, the Searx

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

repository has been archived, stating that SearX is no longer maintained. The

SearXNG SearXNG is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source Federation (information technology), federated metasearch engine forked from Searx. SearXNG supports over 70 different Search engine, search engines. Similar to Searx, it does not ...

repository remains open.

Search engines and other settings

Across all categories, Searx can fetch search results from about 82 different engines. This includes major search engines and site-specific searches like

Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...

Reddit Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the ...

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

Yahoo Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...

, and

Yandex Yandex LLC ( rus, Яндекс, r=Yandeks, p=ˈjandəks) is a Russian technology company that provides Internet-related products and services including a web browser, search engine, cloud computing, web mapping, online food ordering, streaming ...

. The engines used for each search category can be set via a "preferences" interface, and these settings will be saved in a cookie in the user's web browser, rather than on the server side, since for privacy reasons, Searx does not implement a user login model. Other settings such as the search interface language and the search results language (over 20 languages are available) can be set the same way. In addition to the preferences cookie, it is possible on each query to modify the engines used, search categories selected, and/or languages to search in by specifying one or more of the following textual search operators ''before'' the search keywords. * !''category'' — Search the specified ''category'' instead of the default ones. * ?''category'' — Search the specified ''category'' in addition to the default ones. * !''engine'' — Search the specified ''engine'' instead of the default ones. * ?''engine'' — Search the specified ''engine'' in addition to the default ones. * :''language'' — Search for results in the specified ''language'' instead of the default one. The ! and ? operators can be specified more than once to select multiple categories or engines, for example !google !deviantart ?images :japanese cow.

Instances

Any user may run their own instance of Searx, which can be done to maximize privacy, avoid congestion on public instances, preserve customized settings (even if browser cookies are cleared), allow auditing of the source code being run, and more. Users may include their Searx instances on the editable list of all public instances, or keep them private. It is also possible to add custom search engines to a self-hosted instance that are not available on the public instances. In 2019, Google has begun to block some self-hosted instances. This included some of the IP addresses used by searx.me from queries that result in a google (unexpected crash: CAPTCHA required) error. In response, some instances have been modified to silently skip trying to search with Google even when it's the only engine specified.

SearXNG fork

In the middle of 2021, some contributors of SearX forked the repo to

with a view to provide faster debugging and fixes of engine errors. SearXNG is for users that need a faster upstream development time with fewer bugs. User theme, engine reliability and anonymous metrics are the most notable changes in SearXNG.

Footnotes

References

External links