SearXNG: How to Search Across Multiple Engines at Once
Search across multiple engines at once

In this era of search engines that work as advertising platforms, more than a few users want to get results that are a bit more private without really limiting their options. For them there is SearXNG, a metasearch engine that enables advanced search across multiple engines, and also offers a series of very useful custom commands, without telemetry or bloatware running in the background.

When we try to search something on the main web engines, it's likely we'll see a long chain of "sponsored" links before the actual results, or news that have nothing to do with what we want. This is nothing new… and the truth is everything feels a bit worse. Users have adopted different tricks to filter out the junk (e.g., adding "reddit" to searches), however, there is another option: SearXNG.

SearXNG: A web meta-search engine that combines results from multiple engines

SearXNG: How to Search Across Multiple Engines at Once
In this environment, results come from Google and DuckDuckGo at the same time

SearXNG is an open source project based on secondary environments (similar to what Invidious does with YouTube), and enables advanced searches with more than a dozen engines. Looking at the official documentation, we discover that the main options are 14, but we must also add special commands for everything related to Wikimedia (including Wikipedia), image search engines, videos, news, maps, questions and answers (in the style of Ask Ubuntu or Stack Overflow), science publications, APK files, and even torrents.

SearXNG: How to Search Across Multiple Engines at Once
A simple command, and the results become videos

How does it work exactly? Very simple: If we want to search Google and DuckDuckGo at the same time, we write the commands !go and !ddg before the request. To search images, some examples are !goi (Google Images), and !bii (Bing Images). Of course, using these commands is not mandatory, and each environment has a default engine, but its Preferences section offers the possibility to replace it at any time.

SearXNG: How to Search Across Multiple Engines at Once
Preferences are saved as cookies, and there is no account creation here

However, the most important thing here is that SearXNG environments do not track the user or generate profiles. In other words, there is no conversation with the mothership or food for Big Data. In fact, SearXNG has environments compatible with the Tor network, so we can get an extra layer of anonymity if we stick to the Tor Browser.

SearXNG: How to Search Across Multiple Engines at Once
A list of available instances (environments)

Finally, the searx.space portal contains an updated list of active environments. Searx.be and priv.au are usually the most stable, but if something doesn't work at first, we can always change. Links below!