The instances that give the best results seem to also get throttled pretty often on the source search engines, to the point of near uselessness.
Thinking of hosting my own, but the maintenance seems pretty involved according to the docs.
What’s your experience been like?
Edit: all right y’all, thanks for the feedback. I’m going to spin up an instance.


I host my own SearXNG via docker compose, reverse proxied it via Traefik, added a few security headers, restricted access to my country to help prevent abuse.
Use it daily, the only complaint I really have is it occasionally doesn’t search when you type in the address bar of a browser. What I mean is I’ll type a search query and instead of redirecting to the query (searx.yourdomain.tld/search?q=test) it’ll just redirect to the homepage of my SearXNG instance (searx.yourdomain.tld) forcing me to retype my query. Annoying but not the end of the world.
This same behaviour happens to me, but only once in a while.
Do you have the
%sin the search string:searx.yourdomain.tld/search?q=%s. For instance, in Firefox, when you add you searx instance, I had to add the%sto get it to search properly.Yup, it works 90% of the time. Happens on all devices so I suspect Searx is just running into an error of some sort. Too lazy to investigate.