owui-tools/docs/setup/searxng.md

SearXNG — needed by web_search and find_datasheet

Nothing to set up. SearXNG is a container in this project's own docker-compose.yml and starts with the rest of the stack. This page is for when it is not returning results.

What it is

A metasearch front end. It queries several engines and merges the results; owuitools never talks to a search engine directly. It has no API key and no account.

It lives inside the guarded network namespace, sharing it with the tool server, so it is not reachable from your LAN or from the internet, and it can only reach the outside world through squid. That is deliberate: it takes a query string from a language model, and anything that takes model-controlled input belongs behind the same filter the rest of the suite is behind.

Its configuration

configs/services/searxng.settings.yml. The parts worth knowing about:

• server.secret_key — generate your own with openssl rand -hex 32. It signs SearXNG's own session data. The shipped file has a placeholder.
• server.limiter: false — its bot-detection is off, because the only client is the tool server on a private network, and the limiter rejects programmatic queries.
• The engine list. Which engines are on is a measurement, not a preference: some block datacentre IPs, some rate-limit hard, some serve CAPTCHAs. The comments in the file say what was observed and when. Those observations were made from one egress IP and may not hold for yours — if results are thin, this list is the first thing to change.

After editing it: docker compose restart searxng.

Checking it

./tests/try-tool.sh web_search '{"query": "systemd socket activation"}' | head -20

If it returns nothing

1. docker compose logs searxng --tail 50 — engine failures are logged individually, so you can see which ones are refusing.
2. Check squid is up: SearXNG's only route out is owuitools-egress.
3. Try a different engine set. An engine that blocks your IP fails silently from the model's point of view: the search simply comes back empty, which reads as "nothing was written about this" rather than "the search was refused".