SearXNG is a fully open-source search engine aggregator that can combine results from services and databases across the web and present them without any compromises on your privacy. In today’s video, we’ll walk through how to install SearXNG in a container accessible from anywhere through Tailscale.
I learned about SearXNG as part of a self-imposed challenge to avoid Google services as much as possible for a month. I found a robust community of enthusiastic users and contributors who have their own reasons to build up the software over the past several years. Why might somebody want to operate their own self-hosted metasearch engine?
- For many people, the appeal is privacy: SearXNG delivers results without any of the constant background tracking that we’ve grown to expect from the biggest search providers. For the real privacy nerds, a self-hosted instance accessible only over Tailscale is even more locked down!
- For others, it’s configurability. Not only is SearXNG open source, but it’s also built to be hackable, and you have total freedom over what data sources your instance uses and how results get presented.
- For still others, there’s the feeling of control. If you ever get the feeling Google keeps changing the layout and contents of its search engine results page out from under you, maybe you’d be happier with a version that you get to change when you see fit.
In the video tutorial, we use Docker to install SearXNG in an LXC container on top of Proxmox. We also configure Tailscale Serve to make the resulting container accessible on your tailnet (our term for a Tailscale network), and to automatically configure the TLS certificates so your browser is happy.
I hope you found exactly what you were looking for in that video. If you want to keep searching, though, you can stay involved in the Tailscale community — in our YouTube comments, on the bustling subreddit, and in replies on X, on Mastodon, and newly on Bluesky. We love getting feedback on Tailscale and want to hear from you.
Alex Kretzschmar
