These days, the top of every search page is filled with ads and sponsored content rather than real results. Now that AI has completely taken over, users are often misled by the inaccurate information it generates. It’s time to reclaim control over how we search and how we’re tracked.
SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine that aggregates results from 230+ search services [Link]. Users are protected from tracking and profiling, and if necessary, it can work over Tor for total anonymity.
INSTALLATION
The easy way, using Docker.
sudo mkdir /opt/searxng sudo docker run --rm -d -p 8080:8080 -v "/opt/searxng/searxng:/etc/searxng" -e "BASE_URL=http://localhost:8080/" -e "INSTANCE_NAME=My-SearXNG" searxng/searxng
Note: Remove --rm if you want to keep the container on disk for a quick start at any time, or keep it to have it self-destruct when stopped. It is recommended to put a reverse proxy such as NGINX with Certbot in front of it for SSL/TLS.
Navigate to http://<IP>:8080
The second way, using a deployment script that allows tailored configuration at deploy time through a series of prompts.
cd /tmp git clone https://github.com/searxng/searxng.git searxng cd searxng sudo -H ./utils/searxng.sh install all
If you do not have NGINX, install it first.
sudo apt install nginx -y
Either way, add the following configuration to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
location /searxng {
uwsgi_pass unix:///usr/local/searxng/run/socket;
include uwsgi_params;
uwsgi_param HTTP_HOST $host;
uwsgi_param HTTP_CONNECTION $http_connection;
# see flaskfix.py
uwsgi_param HTTP_X_SCHEME $scheme;
uwsgi_param HTTP_X_SCRIPT_NAME /searxng;
# see limiter.py
uwsgi_param HTTP_X_REAL_IP $remote_addr;
uwsgi_param HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
}
For better privacy, disable NGINX logs in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.
http {
# ...
access_log /dev/null;
error_log /dev/null;
# ...
};
Navigate to http://<IP>:<port>/searxng
NAVIGATION
Note the source of each result, plus the option to retrieve a cached version from the Internet Archive.
GENERAL contains basic interface behavior and features, including the SafeSearch level for filtering content.
USER INTERFACE has options for page appearance, such as the Theme and URL Formatting.
PRIVACY defaults to POST requests (to prevent search terms from appearing in your browsing history) and offers options to proxy Images through SearXNG and strip Trackers from URLs.
ENGINES lists 230+ sources to choose from and lets you set a Max Time per category (general, images, videos, etc.) to guarantee a minimum response time.
SPECIAL QUERIES offers built-in tools for calculations, number generation, hashing, and more.
COOKIES explains that SearXNG does not send your browser cookies to external search engines, and shows how to export and import your configuration across browsers.
BONUS
Some search engines claim to be privacy-focused, such as Qwant [Link], which markets itself as “The search engine that doesn’t know anything about you.”