searxngcli

searxngcli

Search the web via a private SearXNG metasearch engine instance using the searxng CLI.

SearXNG aggregates results from multiple search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.) and supports engine-specific operators like site:, filetype:, intitle: — these are passed through to backend engines as-is.

Usage

Always use --json for machine-readable output. Always quote the query string.

# Basic search
searxng search "python asyncio" --json

# Filter by category (general, images, news, videos, music, files, it, science, social media)
searxng search "breaking news" --categories news --json

# Filter by specific engines
searxng search "rust" --engines google,duckduckgo --json

# Filter by time range (day, week, month, year)
searxng search "latest updates" --time-range week --json

# Combine filters
searxng search "climate change" --categories news --time-range month --num 20 --json

# Use search engine operators (passed through to engines)
searxng search "site:github.com python cli" --json

Search Options

Flag	Description
--categories	Comma-separated categories
--engines	Comma-separated engines
--language	Language code (en, de, cs, etc.)
--num	Number of results (default: 10)
--page	Page number (default: 1)
--time-range	day, week, month, year
--safe-search	0=off, 1=moderate, 2=strict
--json	Raw JSON output

Discovery

# List available engines on the instance
searxng engines

# List available categories
searxng categories

Output Format

The --json output is a JSON object with these top-level fields:

{
  "query": "search terms",
  "number_of_results": 100,
  "results": [
    {
      "title": "asyncio — Asynchronous I/O — Python 3.14.3 documentation",
      "url": "https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html",
      "content": "asyncio is a library to write concurrent code using the async/await syntax...",
      "engine": "google",
      "engines": ["braveapi", "google", "startpage"],
      "category": "general",
      "score": 9.0,
      "published_date": "2025-07-30T00:00:00",
      "thumbnail": ""
    }
  ],
  "suggestions": ["related query 1", "related query 2"],
  "corrections": []
}

Never pipe through grep, head, tail, or similar text tools — the output is already structured JSON. Use jq if filtering is needed:

# Extract just URLs
searxng search "python asyncio" --json | jq -r '.results[].url'

# Extract title and URL pairs
searxng search "python asyncio" --json | jq '.results[] | {title, url}'

Important Notes

• Prefer defaults — do not use -c, -e, or -l flags unless there is a clear reason to narrow the scope (e.g., user explicitly asks for news, or for results from a specific engine). The instance is pre-configured with good defaults.
• Place all flags after the subcommand: searxng search "query" --json (not searxng --json search "query")
• If the CLI is not configured, ask the user for their SearXNG instance URL