MCP SearXNG
An MCP server that connects AI agents to a SearXNG metasearch engine instance for privacy-respecting web search and URL content extraction, returning results and page content in clean markdown format.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
Privacy-preserving search MCP via SearXNG. Self-hosted recommended for privacy. No external API keys needed for self-hosted. Public instances may log queries.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You already run SearXNG (or want to) and need a privacy-preserving, self-hosted search tool for your AI agents.
Avoid When
You need a managed, SLA-backed search API without self-hosting overhead — use Brave Search MCP or Tavily instead.
Use Cases
- • Give AI agents real-time web search capabilities without sending queries to Google or Bing directly
- • Extract and convert web page content to markdown for AI summarization or analysis
- • Build research agents that need paginated, time-filtered, or language-specific web results
- • Self-host a search backend for an AI stack with full query privacy
Not For
- • Teams without a running SearXNG instance — requires self-hosting the search engine
- • Scenarios needing guaranteed result freshness from a specific search index (metasearch quality varies by SearXNG config)
- • High-volume crawling — SearXNG instances have their own rate limits from upstream engines
Interface
Authentication
Authentication is optional. If the SearXNG instance requires it, HTTP Basic Auth credentials can be provided via AUTH_USERNAME and AUTH_PASSWORD environment variables. Proxy support also available.
Pricing
MIT licensed. Requires a self-hosted SearXNG instance (also free and open source).
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Result quality entirely depends on the SearXNG instance configuration and which upstream engines are enabled
- ⚠ SearXNG instances may be rate-limited by upstream search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) causing intermittent failures
- ⚠ URL content extraction may fail on JavaScript-heavy SPAs that require browser rendering
- ⚠ Caching TTL for URL reads may return stale content for frequently updated pages
Alternatives
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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.