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PeARS

Lightweight distributed web search you can host yourself

Search Engines ★ 38 stars Medium setup AGPL-3.0

PeARS is a lightweight, distributed web search engine designed to run on modest hardware. It lets communities index and share parts of the web without a central server.

Official siteSource code

Key features

  • Runs on low-power hardware
  • Community-shared indexes
  • Decentralized search
  • Privacy preserving

Pros & cons

Strengths

  • Very lightweight
  • Community oriented

Trade-offs

  • Small project and index

Is PeARS secure?

OSV.dev has no published security advisories for PeARS's repository. No known vulnerabilities is not proof of security: it means none have been publicly catalogued.

Source: OSV.dev, checked 2026-10-14. How this is measured.

PeARS replaces

Self-hosted Google Search alternatives

Health badge

Maintain PeARS? Add its health score to your README. The badge links back to this page.

SelfHostIndex: 0 · at risk

Markdown
[![SelfHostIndex health score for PeARS](https://selfhostindex.com/badge/pears-search.svg)](https://selfhostindex.com/app/pears-search/)
HTML
<a href="https://selfhostindex.com/app/pears-search/"><img src="https://selfhostindex.com/badge/pears-search.svg" alt="SelfHostIndex health score for PeARS"></a>
reStructuredText
.. image:: https://selfhostindex.com/badge/pears-search.svg
   :alt: SelfHostIndex health score for PeARS
   :target: https://selfhostindex.com/app/pears-search/

The score is recomputed on every nightly rebuild from public repository data — see how it is calculated.

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