Open-source Google Search alternatives

SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine. It sends your query to many search services and databases, merges the results into one page, and does so without tracking or profiling the people who use it. Topics list engines such as Google, Bing, Brave, DuckDuckGo, Qwant and Startpage among the sources it can combine.

The documentation is organized for both users and administrators. Users get search syntax, a list of configured engines and an explanation of why a private instance matters. Administrators get settings in settings.yml, engine configuration, plugins, a bot-protection limiter, optional Redis or Valkey storage, and installation guides covering containers, an installation script and step-by-step setups with Granian or uWSGI behind NGINX or Apache. A long catalog of engines extends beyond web search to sources such as arXiv, Crossref, GitHub and Mastodon.

SearXNG is written in Python under the AGPL-3.0 license. Because it is meant to be self-hosted, you can run your own instance for yourself or a group; many volunteers also publicly host instances. It appeals to people who want to reduce reliance on any one search engine and keep their queries private.

YaCy is a complete search engine application: a server that hosts a search index, a web interface for searching and creating the index, and a production-ready crawler with a scheduler to keep the index fresh. It can run as a node in a distributed peer-to-peer network or as a private search portal.

YaCy search portals can also be placed inside an intranet, where the README says they can replace commercial enterprise search products, and a network scanner helps discover HTTP, FTP and SMB servers to index. The project was created with privacy as a primary motivation, and running a personal search engine avoids handing queries to a central provider. It is written in Java and tagged for decentralized search and privacy protection.

The repository license is shown as 'Other' on GitHub, reflecting the GPL family of licenses, so check the terms. YaCy is self-hosted on your own machine or server. It suits privacy-minded users, organizations that need intranet search and communities that want a decentralized alternative to commercial search.

degoog is a search engine aggregator that sends your query to several search engines and shows the combined results in one place. It is aimed at people who want to reduce dependence on a single large search provider and is self-hosted, with a TypeScript code base released under the AGPL-3.0 license. The project is in a stable beta, usable in production but with some inconsistent behavior possible.

A plugin system is its defining feature. You can add custom search engines, bang-command plugins, slot plugins that show query-triggered panels above, below, or beside the results, and transports that define custom HTTP fetch strategies, such as curl, FlareSolverr, or your own. The author hopes for a community marketplace for plugins and engines in the future.

By default the app runs on port 4444 under user 1000, with environment variables documented on the project site, and there is a Discord community. degoog suits privacy-minded users, homelab operators, and developers who want a customizable personal search front end.

Marginalia Search is the source code of an independent internet search engine that indexes the small, old, and unusual parts of the web. The project describes itself as an experimental workshop as much as a public service, developing alternative ways to discover content and elevating the more human, non-commercial side of the Internet. It is written in Java, and the input lists its license only as other.

A side goal is to run the operation on affordable hardware with minimal operational overhead instead of datacenters. The system can run as a copy of Marginalia itself or as a white-label search engine over your own data, whether crawled or side-loaded, though its logic is not yet very configurable and reflects the project's goals. Setup uses run/setup.sh to download supplementary model data, and a local test environment is described in the repository.

The long-term plan is to be funded through grants, donations, and commercial API licenses, while non-commercial share-alike use remains free. Documentation is at docs.marginalia.nu and a public instance runs at marginalia-search.com. It suits people who value the small web and developers curious about building a search engine.

Searx is a self-hostable metasearch engine written in Python. It sends a user's query to many search services at once and presents the combined results without storing or profiling the person searching. It is released under the AGPL-3.0 license, and the repository carries only a short description.

The website listed for this entry, hister.org, actually belongs to Hister, a different project that describes itself as a private, self-hosted search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep, searchable from the web, a terminal, the command line, or MCP. It is not the Searx site. Searx development has also largely continued in forks, so check the repository for the current maintenance state before choosing it.

Metasearch tools like Searx suit privacy-minded individuals and organizations that want to run their own search front end, reduce reliance on a single provider, and avoid advertising-driven result tracking.

Mwmbl is a non-profit, open-source search engine that aims to replace commercial engines such as Google and Bing with a community-run alternative. It promises no ads, no tracking, and no profit, and it lets the community determine rankings. The code is written in Python and released under the AGPL-3.0 license.

The index is centralized, but the crawling is distributed across servers run by volunteers, who also help curate search results. The README is candid that the index is currently much smaller than those of commercial search engines and invites people to help it grow by contributing crawling capacity.

The main community gathers on Matrix, with a Discord server for non-development discussion. Mwmbl suits privacy-minded users and developers who want to experiment with independent search, and who are willing to accept more limited coverage in exchange for a transparent, non-commercial project.