README - mcp-searxng-public by pwilkin

mcp-searxng-public

An MCP server that queries public SearXNG instances, parsing HTML contents into a JSON result

Rationale

All the MCP servers for SearXNG that I've seen use "json" as the output format. While that is certainly a faster way to code a SearXNG MCP server, it will make it fail on virtually all public servers since they don't expose the JSON format.

This server will read from up to three public SearXNG servers (using one as main and the others as fallback) and will parse the results into JSON.

Installation

Install via npm install mcp-searxng-public.

If the server is installed, the run configuration is:

{
      "name": "SearXNGScraper",
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["mcp-searxng-public"],
      "capabilities": {
        "tool-calls": true
      },
      "env": {
        "SEARXNG_BASE_URL": "https://searx.be;https://searx.tiekoetter.com;https://opnxng.com;https://searxng.world;https://searx.oloke.xyz;https://seek.fyi",
        "DEFAULT_LANGUAGE": "en"
      }
}

(you can use any servers from https://searx.space/ as your selected servers)

For use with Cursor, the MCP definition is as follows:

{
  "SearXNGScraper": {
    "command": "npx",
    "args": ["mcp-searxng-public"],
    "capabilities": {
      "tool-calls": true
    },
    "env": {
      "SEARXNG_BASE_URL": "https://searx.be;https://searx.tiekoetter.com;https://opnxng.com",
      "DEFAULT_LANGUAGE": "en"
    }
  }
}

Note: You may need to adjust the env variables, particularly SEARXNG_BASE_URL, to point to your preferred SearXNG instances. The DEFAULT_LANGUAGE can also be set as needed.

Usage

The server exposes one endpoint: search. The endpoint takes three arguments:

query - the search query
time_range (optional) - which takes a time range parameter according to the https://docs.searxng.org/dev/search_api.html spec (day, month or year).
language (optional) - the language code for the search (e.g., en, es, fr). If not provided, it defaults to the value of the DEFAULT_LANGUAGE environment variable. If neither is set, no language parameter is sent to SearXNG.

Returned is an array of objects:

[
      {
        "url": "https://github.com/searxng/searxng",
        "summary": "You can start SearXNG using make run in the terminal or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+B"
      },
      {
        "url": "https://searx.bndkt.io/",
        "summary": "Powered by searxng - 2025.3.22+5986629c6 — a privacy-respecting, open metasearch engine Source code | Issue tracker | Engine stats | Public instances | Contact instance maintainer"
      },
      {
        "url": "https://docs.searxng.org/"
        "summary": "SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from up to 243 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, SearXNG can be used over Tor …"
      }
      {
        "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SearXNG",
        "summary": "SearXNG is federated, and as such is hosted by several instances, public and private. Private instances are hosted on a local network, or run on the user&#x27;s desktop computer itself, and are …"
      }
]