Ohi, I'm the original creator of Searx, but due to the limitations of the metasearch concept I'm not involved in the development anymore. My new search project is https://github.com/asciimoo/hister (https://hister.org/).
Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. Storing full page content allows serving offline result previews and the full page content via MCP.
Both are search engines, but that's all the similarity. Hister has a traditional crawler, but its biggest strength is automatically indexing browser tabs as those are rendered. This way it bypasses authentication, CloudFlare, captchas and most of the annoying limitations of traditional crawlers.
Hister also provides full offline result previews. Check out the small read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
SearXNG is my daily internet search now +5 years; with YaCY Backends and else as fallback. I also build internal document search or RAG applications with this setup (SearXNG also support json results).
However, there are some downer I accept because of privacy:
1. Its slower and the results are not that good then with others. But fast and good enough for most of my queries.
2. From time to time you get blocked on the duckduckgo, brave or whatever search and you must solve some captures. You can prevent this by getting and using API-Keys from them.
The nice thing about using your own backend is, that you can prio it in the results and for example, if I crawl the smallweb and other site important for myself, this sites come up first in the results.
TinySearch wraps this and works well for agents. It's better than the native SearXNG MCP because it optimizes the context before it even gets to the agent so as to not waste tokens.
It has a JSON mode that you need to enable in settings and then you can create a simple python script to interact with it or have the agent use `curl` and `jq` to interact with it.
I am also interested in what a full local AI stack with web search and other tools looks like. As far as I can tell, SearX does not embed an MCP server, so it can't be directly called from llama-server for example. Open WebUI does have an integration for SearX and other providers, but the results I obtained weren't particularly impressive.
I've been using SearXNG for a few years now, however I've been trying out Degoog as a SearXNG alternative since I've had issues with engines constantly failing or being slow since day 1 of using SearXNG, but Degoog has worse results with the same engines. It's a shame since I'm having to pick between slower but better results, or very fast but worse results.
I've been using this for some projects. It's exceptional and I recommend it highly.
I actually included a recipe to deploy it to kubernetes in typekro, my TypeScript infrastructure-as-code project for kubernetes: https://typekro.run/api/searxng/
I’ll have to try, I’ve only recently learned Exa pricing is a bit crazy (especially on searches where you source 30-40 sources)I just used it be default and then was like oh damn when I got hit
Yeah, I find that searx results are way more relevant to what I’m actually looking for than a single engine. There’s so much manipulation going on that if you don’t aggregate multiple engines, it’s near impossible to get what you want.
Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. Storing full page content allows serving offline result previews and the full page content via MCP.
Take a look at how the MCP can be utilized: https://hister.org/posts/give-your-ai-assistant-a-private-me...
The nice thing about using your own backend is, that you can prio it in the results and for example, if I crawl the smallweb and other site important for myself, this sites come up first in the results.
https://github.com/MarcellM01/TinySearch
I'm curious what setups folks use to provide this functionality.
Since the quantized 24B parameter Gemma model came out, I've had good luck with tool calling on a 4070 Ti Super.
Successful tool calling is what finally made the local experience useful.
I should note this is for the general and not coding specific context.
It's at the bottom of this page: https://docs.searxng.org/admin/settings/settings_search.html
I actually included a recipe to deploy it to kubernetes in typekro, my TypeScript infrastructure-as-code project for kubernetes: https://typekro.run/api/searxng/