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
I’ve been using a SearXNG randomizer, but most of the instances it passes to are kinda broken, sadly… It’d be really really cool if this thingy let you randomize across a selection of instances. It’s already super cool, but that’d be like mindblowingly cool
In my experience, the puplic searxng instances I use(d) are broken and only spit out gibberish, if anything at all for a few months.
There are some that work perfectly
Care to share?
Thank you!
Since it is a public instance a lot of people searching make its harder to not get blocked by Google… I prefer to selfhost mine and me the only one using it.
First couple uses and I can easily see this replacing my Firefox search widget on my home screen.
However, when I click the search widget on my home screen, The app launches, but doesn’t put focus on the search bar so I have to manually click it again.
I would recommend having the app launch and the focus immediately going to the search bar within the app when a person clicks on the search widget on their home screen. That way they don’t have to click it again and activate the keyboard to search.
I hope Lawnchair will add this as a search engine
