Searx (; stylized as searX) is a

free Free may refer to: Concept * Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything * Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism * Emancipate, to procur ...

and

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

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 connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...

es or search history with the

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

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 accept the data enclosed in the body of the request message, most likely for storing it. It is of ...

, 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. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...

user-sourced results

ranking A ranking is a relationship between a set of items 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 order or total preorder of o ...

. 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, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

. 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 the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and s ...

, while the proxied links allow viewing the current live page via a Searx-based

web proxy In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource. Instead of connecting directly to a server that can fulfill a request ...

. In addition to the general search, the engine also features tabs to search within specific domains: files, images, IT, 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 hidden services. Meta-Searx instances can also be used to forward the search query to a random public instance. A public API 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 current and ...

search provider plugins.

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,

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news news aggregator, aggregation, Review site#Rating site, content rating, and Internet forum, discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") subm ...

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read ref ...

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

, and

Yandex Yandex LLC (russian: link=no, Яндекс, p=ˈjandəks) is a Russian multinational technology company providing Internet-related products and services, including an Internet search engine, information services, e-commerce, transportation, map ...

. 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 In computer security, logging in (or logging on, signing in, or signing on) is the process by which an individual gains access to a computer system by identifying and authenticating themselves. The user credentials are typically some form ...

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, to avoid congestion on public instances, to preserve customized settings even if browser cookies are cleared, to allow auditing of the source code being run, etc. 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. Another reason to use different Searx instances, and/or to run one's own, is that as of 2019, Google has begun to block some instances, including some of the IP addresses used by searx.me (former instance run by the developer), from querying it, resulting 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.

Footnotes

References

External links

* {{Tor hidden services Internet privacy software Metasearch engines Free software programmed in Python Software using the GNU AGPL license Free search engine software

Search engines and other settings

Instances

See also

Footnotes

References

External links