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Best No-Database Search Engines for self-hosting

The 21 best No-Database search engines you can self-host, ranked by community traction.

SearXNG

Privacy-respecting metasearch engine aggregating many sources

Replaces Google Search, Bing

★ 35.1k Easy setup AGPL-3.0

Sonic

Fast, lightweight schema-less search backend

Replaces Algolia, Elasticsearch

★ 21.3k Medium setup MPL-2.0

Tantivy

Full-text search engine library written in Rust

Replaces Elasticsearch

★ 15.7k Hard setup MIT

SearX

The original privacy-respecting metasearch engine

Replaces Google Search, Bing

★ 13.5k Easy setup AGPL-3.0

Whoogle Search

Self-hosted, ad-free, privacy-respecting Google search proxy

Replaces Google Search

★ 11.6k Easy setup MIT

Sonic Note Meili-alt Bleve

Embeddable full-text search and indexing library

Replaces Elasticsearch, Algolia

★ 11.2k Medium setup Apache-2.0

Lunr.js

Small full-text search library for the browser

Replaces Algolia, Elasticsearch

★ 9.2k Easy setup MIT

Pagefind

Static-site search that runs fully in the browser

Replaces Algolia, Elasticsearch

★ 5.4k Easy setup MIT

Apache Lucene

Foundational open-source text search engine library

Replaces proprietary search SDKs

★ 3.5k Hard setup Apache-2.0

tinysearch

Tiny WebAssembly-powered static site search

Replaces Algolia

★ 3k Medium setup MIT

Stork

Fast, accessible static site search in WebAssembly

Replaces Algolia

★ 2.8k Easy setup Apache-2.0

Stract

Open-source web search engine you can self-host

Replaces Google Search, Bing

★ 2.4k Hard setup AGPL-3.0

Pyserini Search

Reproducible information retrieval toolkit

Replaces Elasticsearch

★ 2.1k Hard setup Apache-2.0

Marginalia Search

Independent search engine focused on the non-commercial web

Replaces Google Search

★ 1.9k Hard setup AGPL-3.0

Websurfx

Privacy-respecting metasearch engine written in Rust

Replaces Google Search

★ 1.2k Easy setup AGPL-3.0

Xapian

Mature open-source probabilistic search engine library

Replaces Elasticsearch

★ 877 Medium setup GPL-2.0

Groonga

Open-source full-text search engine and column store

Replaces Elasticsearch

★ 854 Medium setup LGPL-2.1

LibreX

Privacy-respecting metasearch engine and proxy

Replaces Google Search

★ 842 Easy setup AGPL-3.0

4get

Lightweight privacy-friendly metasearch proxy

Replaces Google Search, Bing

★ 800 Easy setup AGPL-3.0

Whoosh

Pure-Python full-text indexing and search library

Replaces Elasticsearch

★ 358 Easy setup BSD-2-Clause

LibreY

Privacy-respecting metasearch engine

Replaces Google Search

★ 312 Easy setup AGPL-3.0

Every option here is open-source and self-hostable, tagged No-Database within the search engines category. Compare them on the individual app pages for setup difficulty and resource requirements.