SearXNG

Self-hosted, privacy-respecting meta-search engine that aggregates results from multiple search providers without tracking queries. Runs as a Docker container. The wiki’s first self-hosted web search entry — the self-hostable alternative to paid search APIs (Google Custom Search, Bing Search API, Tavily, Brave Search API).

• GitHub: searxng/searxng
• License: AGPL-3.0
• Deployment: Docker (single container)

Why It Matters for AI Agents

AI agents that need web search typically rely on paid APIs (Tavily, Brave, Google). SearXNG provides free, unlimited, private web search with no API key and no rate limits. Per Bart Slodyczka’s setup guide, it has a native integration with OpenClaw, making it a drop-in replacement for paid search providers.

Setup with OpenClaw

1. Pull the Docker image (one command from OpenClaw docs)
2. Critical config change: SearXNG defaults to HTML format; OpenClaw requires JSON. Edit settings.yaml inside the Docker container (/etc/searxng/settings.yaml), find the formats section, add - json alongside - html
3. Restart the container
4. Configure OpenClaw via openclaw configure or CLI command to point at the local SearXNG instance

How It Works

SearXNG is a meta-search engine — it doesn’t crawl the web itself. It sends your query to multiple upstream search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.) and aggregates the results. The upstream engines see a request from your server, not your identity. Your queries never leave your machine in identifiable form.

See Also

• openclaw — native integration
• ollama — paired for a fully local AI stack
• self-hostable-alternatives — SearXNG fills the “web search” row
• Source: Gemma 4 + SearXNG + OpenClaw