Self-Hosted Search & Privacy Front-Ends

Meta-search engines (private front-ends)

• ★ SearXNG — actively-maintained fork of Searx; aggregates results from many engines; great privacy. The default in 2026.
  • https://github.com/searxng/searxng
• Whoogle Search — Google front-end without tracking; minimal.
  • https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search
• LibreY — Searx-shape, lighter.
  • https://github.com/Ahwxorg/LibreY
• 4get — minimal, privacy-focused.
• Stract — newer; OSS web search engine + crawler.
  • https://github.com/StractOrg/stract

Privacy front-ends for other services

• ★ Invidious — YouTube front-end without tracking / ads.
  • https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
• Piped — alternative YouTube front-end; better mobile.
  • https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped
• NewPipe — Android client; uses your own / others' Piped instances.
• Nitter — Twitter / X front-end; varying availability due to API changes.
  • https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
• Redlib / Libreddit — Reddit alternatives.
  • https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
• ProxiTok — TikTok front-end.
• Teddit — Reddit front-end.

In-app full-text search (your own data)

For self-host-style search of your own corpus, see Search — Meilisearch, Typesense, Pagefind, Orama. These are not "Google replacements" but "search across my notes / docs / files."

Wallabag / Linkding / RSS as search sources

• Karakeep indexes saved pages with full-text + AI tags.
• Linkding has full-text search.
• FreshRSS has search across all subscribed feeds.

Patterns to adopt

• Set as default search engine in your browser — Firefox / Brave / Chromium support OpenSearch.
• Pick instances carefully if you don't self-host — public SearXNG instances vary in trust / quality.
• Cache aggressively — SearXNG has a Redis cache backend.
• Behind Tailscale / Cloudflare Access — public SearXNG instances get rate-limited / banned by upstream engines fast.
• Don't expect parity with Google for everything. SearXNG aggregates; quality is bound by what upstream engines return.

Pick this if…

• Default privacy-first meta-search: SearXNG.
• YouTube without YouTube: Invidious or Piped.
• Reddit without Reddit: Redlib.
• Build your own indexed search: Stract (web crawler) or Pagefind / Orama (your-content scope).
• Search your own notes / files: Meilisearch / Typesense (see Search).