🔍 SearXNG MCP Server

Private web search for AI assistants — connect any SearXNG instance to Claude, Cursor, and more.

An MCP server that integrates the SearXNG API, giving AI assistants web search capabilities.

✨ Featured in the GitHub MCP Registry.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client configuration (e.g. claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "searxng": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-searxng"],
      "env": {
        "SEARXNG_URL": "YOUR_SEARXNG_INSTANCE_URL"
      }
    }
  }
}

Replace YOUR_SEARXNG_INSTANCE_URL with the URL of your SearXNG instance (e.g. https://searxng.example.com).

Features

• Web Search: General queries, news, articles, with pagination.
• Structured Search Output: Choose formatted text or raw SearXNG-shaped JSON with response_format.
• Direct Answers & Metadata: Text results surface SearXNG answers, corrections, suggestions, and infoboxes before result lists.
• Search Suggestions: Query autocomplete via SearXNG's /autocompleter endpoint.
• Instance Capability Discovery: Inspect configured categories, engines, defaults, locales, and plugins from /config.
• URL Content Reading: Advanced content extraction with pagination, section filtering, and heading extraction.
• Intelligent Caching: URL content is cached with TTL (Time-To-Live) to improve performance and reduce redundant requests.
• Pagination: Control which page of results to retrieve.
• Time Filtering: Filter results by time range (day, week, month, year).
• Language Selection: Filter results by preferred language.
• Safe Search: Control content filtering level for search results.
• Relevance Filtering: Filter out low-scoring search results with min_score.

Why mcp-searxng?

| | Brave MCP | Exa MCP | Firecrawl MCP | mcp-searxng | |--|:---------:|:-------:|:-------------:|:---------------:| | Web Search | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | | Read URL | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | | Pagination | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | | Self-hosted | ✗ | ✗ | Partial | ✓ | | Privacy | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | | Free / No API key | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |

How It Works

mcp-searxng is a standalone MCP server — a separate Node.js process that your AI assistant connects to for web search. It queries any SearXNG instance via its HTTP JSON API.

Not a SearXNG plugin: This project cannot be installed as a native SearXNG plugin. Point it at any existing SearXNG instance by setting SEARXNG_URL.

AI Assistant (e.g. Claude)
        │  MCP protocol
        ▼
  mcp-searxng  (this project — Node.js process)
        │  HTTP JSON API  (SEARXNG_URL)
        ▼
  SearXNG instance

Tools

• searxng_web_search

  • Execute web searches with pagination
  • Inputs:
    • query (string): The search query. This string is passed to external search services.
    • pageno (number, optional): Search page number, starts at 1 (default 1)
    • time_range (string, optional): Filter results by time range - one of: "day", "week", "month", "year" (default: none)
    • language (string, optional): Language code for results (e.g., "en", "fr", "de") or "all" (default: "all")
    • safesearch (number, optional): Safe search filter level (0: None, 1: Moderate, 2: Strict) (default: instance setting)
    • min_score (number, optional): Minimum relevance score from 0.0 to 1.0. Results below this score are filtered out.
    • num_results (number, optional): Maximum number of results to return, from 1 to 20. SEARXNG_MAX_RESULTS applies as an operator ceiling.
    • categories (string, optional): Comma-separated SearXNG categories (e.g. "news", "it,science"). When live /config is available, values are trimmed and normalized case-insensitively to the instance's canonical category names; unknown values are rejected with available categories listed. If /config is unavailable, values are forwarded as-is with a warning. Default: SearXNG instance default.
    • engines (string, optional): Comma-separated SearXNG engine names (e.g. "google,bing,ddg", "semantic scholar"). When live /config is available, values are trimmed and normalized case-insensitively to canonical engine names, including engines disabled by default; unknown values are rejected with available engines listed. If /config is unavailable, values are forwarded as-is with a warning.
    • response_format (string, optional): Response format, either "text" for formatted agent-readable output or "json" for raw SearXNG JSON with filtered/sliced results. (default: "text")

• searxng_search_suggestions

  • Get autocomplete suggestions for refining search queries
  • Inputs:
    • query (string): Partial or complete query to autocomplete.
    • language (string, optional): Language code for suggestions (e.g., "en", "fr", "de") or "all" (default: "all")

• searxng_instance_info

  • Discover categories, engines, defaults, locales, and plugins exposed by the configured SearXNG instance
  • Inputs:
    • includeEngines (boolean, optional): Include enabled engine names in the response. (default: false)
    • includeDisabled (boolean, optional): Include disabled engine names when includeEngines is true. (default: false)
    • category (string, optional): Filter categories and engines to a single category name.
    • refresh (boolean, optional): Bypass the process cache and fetch fresh /config data. (default: false)

• web_url_read

  • Read and convert the content from a URL to markdown with advanced content extraction options
  • Inputs:
    • url (string): The URL to fetch and process
    • startChar (number, optional): Starting character position for content extraction (default: 0)
    • maxLength (number, optional): Maximum number of characters to return
    • section (string, optional): Extract content under a specific heading (searches for heading text)
    • paragraphRange (string, optional): Return specific paragraph ranges (e.g., '1-5', '3', '10-')
    • readHeadings (boolean, optional): Return only a list of headings instead of full content

Installation

npm install -g mcp-searxng

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "searxng": {
      "command": "mcp-searxng",
      "env": {
        "SEARXNG_URL": "YOUR_SEARXNG_INSTANCE_URL"
      }
    }
  }
}

Pre-built image:

docker pull isokoliuk/mcp-searxng:latest

Image signatures can be verified with Cosign — see SECURITY.md for instructions.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "searxng": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run", "-i", "--rm",
        "-e", "SEARXNG_URL",
        "isokoliuk/mcp-searxng:latest"
      ],
      "env": {
        "SEARXNG_URL": "YOUR_SEARXNG_INSTANCE_URL"
      }
    }
  }
}

To pass additional env vars, add -e VAR_NAME to args and the variable to env.

Build locally:

docker build -t mcp-searxng:latest -f Dockerfile .

Use the same config above, replacing isokoliuk/mcp-searxng:latest with mcp-searxng:latest.

docker-compose.yml:

services:
  mcp-searxng:
    image: isokoliuk/mcp-searxng:latest
    stdin_open: true
    environment:
      - SEARXNG_URL=YOUR_SEARXNG_INSTANCE_URL
      # Add optional variables as needed — see CONFIGURATION.md

MCP client config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "searxng": {
      "command": "docker-compose",
      "args": ["run", "--rm", "mcp-searxng"]
    }
  }
}

By default the server uses STDIO. Set MCP_HTTP_PORT to enable HTTP mode:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "searxng-http": {
      "command": "mcp-searxng",
      "env": {
        "SEARXNG_URL": "YOUR_SEARXNG_INSTANCE_URL",
        "MCP_HTTP_PORT": "3000"
      }
    }
  }
}

Endpoints: POST/GET/DELETE /mcp (MCP protocol), GET /health (health check)

Test it:

MCP_HTTP_PORT=3000 SEARXNG_URL=http://localhost:8080 mcp-searxng
curl http://localhost:3000/health

Configuration

Set SEARXNG_URL to your SearXNG instance URL. All other variables are optional.

Full environment variable reference: CONFIGURATION.md

Troubleshooting

403 Forbidden from SearXNG

Your SearXNG instance likely has JSON format disabled. Edit settings.yml (usually /etc/searxng/settings.yml):

search:
  formats:
    - html
    - json

Restart SearXNG (docker restart searxng) then verify:

curl 'http://localhost:8080/search?q=test&format=json'

You should receive a JSON response. If not, confirm the file is correctly mounted and YAML indentation is valid.

See also: SearXNG settings docs · discussion

Can't enable JSON? (HTML fallback)

If you must use a public instance you don't control and it rejects format=json (the 403 above), set the opt-in flag instead of editing the server:

"SEARXNG_HTML_FALLBACK": "true"

A search that gets a 403/404 or a non-JSON response is then retried automatically without format=json and parsed from the regular HTML results page.

• On success: you get normal results (title, URL, snippet). They are marked sourceFormat: "html" in JSON mode, and text mode adds the line "Note: Results parsed from SearXNG HTML fallback; metadata is limited." Relevance scores and engine names are not available from HTML.
• On failure: parsing is best-effort and varies by the instance's theme/version, so some results may be missed or sparse. If the HTML page itself also fails — still blocked, rate-limited (429), auth (401), or 5xx — the original error is surfaced unchanged. The fallback only triggers on 403/404/non-JSON, never on auth or network errors.

Enabling JSON on an instance you control (above) remains the recommended setup — the fallback is a compatibility aid, not a replacement.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md

Star History

License

MIT — see LICENSE for details.