Search with SearXNG natively on Android.
searxist (pronounce: searchist) is a simple Android app to wrap SearXNG in a WebView with Material You colors, plus some system integrations.
- 🌙 Material You theming
- 🔍 System search integration (search bar widget, popup text action)
- 🌐 Choose from public SearXNG instances or add your own
- 🛡️ Privacy-focused (no unnecessary data collection!)
- 📱 Supports Android 5+
The app itself is great, but it doesn’t currently allow access to instance settings (like selecting which search engines to use). Additionally, SearXNG has been struggling to return Google results lately, which really limits its usefulness at the moment. For now, I’ve found 4get to be a better alternative.
I truly miss the SearXNG of a few months ago, before Google broke it. It was such a fantastic tool, and I hope it can regain its former glory soon.
Mmm, I really didn’t know 4get, I thought it was another generic search engine like Metagear, I’ll be trying it for a while, I like that you can switch between different search engines, although the design is a bit… Bizarre haha
Some servers work, on top of that you can configure them not to use any other search engine than Google, if I want something purely Google and private I would go for Starpage.
Lately I use Brave Search, it seems to me a little better because it is even independent, if possible I would configure a SearXNG server that uses Brave’s engine
Some servers may work, but I specifically want to use my own instance. At the moment, I can’t get Google results working on it, and on top of that, Searxist doesn’t allow me to edit instance preferences anyway.
I still use SearXNG with Startpage and Brave, and most of the time that’s enough for my needs. But when I specifically want Google results, I switch to 4get.
I’ll keep an eye on Searxist’s development though. It’s a nice app already, and I’m genuinely curious to see how it evolves