Search Engines

Self-hosted search engines and information retrieval systems

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. This includes Web search engines.

Applications

Aleph

Tool for indexing large amounts of both documents (PDF, Word, HTML) and structured (CSV, XLS, SQL) data for easy browsing and search. It is built with investigative reporting as a primary use case.

• Website: https://aleph.occrp.org/
• Demo: https://aleph.occrp.org/
• Source Code: https://github.com/alephdata/aleph
• License: MIT
• Platform: Docker/K8S

Apache Solr

Enterprise search platform featuring full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling.

• Website: https://lucene.apache.org/solr/
• Source Code: https://github.com/apache/solr
• License: Apache-2.0
• Platform: Java/Docker/K8S

Fess

Powerful and easily deployable Enterprise Search Server.

• Website: https://fess.codelibs.org/
• Demo: https://search.n2sm.co.jp/
• Source Code: https://github.com/codelibs/fess
• License: Apache-2.0
• Platform: Java/Docker

Jina

Cloud-native neural search framework for any kind of data.

• Website: https://github.com/jina-ai/serve
• License: Apache-2.0
• Platform: Python/Docker

Manticore Search

Full-text search and data analytics, with fast response time for small, medium and big data (alternative to Elasticsearch).

• Website: https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/
• License: GPL-3.0
• Platform: Docker/deb/C++/K8S

MeiliSearch

Ultra relevant, instant and typo-tolerant full-text search API.

• Website: https://www.meilisearch.com
• Source Code: https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch
• License: MIT
• Platform: Rust/Docker/deb

Meme Search

AI-powered meme search engine. Automatically extracts descriptions from images using vision-language models, then indexes with vector embeddings for semantic and keyword search.

• Website: https://github.com/neonwatty/meme-search
• License: Apache-2.0
• Platform: Docker

OpenSearch

Distributed and RESTful search engine.

• Website: https://opensearch.org
• Source Code: https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch
• License: Apache-2.0
• Platform: Java/Docker/K8S/deb

SearXNG

Internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases (Fork of Searx).

• Website: https://docs.searxng.org/
• Source Code: https://github.com/searxng/searxng/
• License: AGPL-3.0
• Platform: Python/Docker
• Note: ⚠ Anti-features

sist2

Lightning-fast file system indexer and search tool.

• Website: https://github.com/sist2app/sist2
• License: GPL-3.0
• Platform: C/Docker

Sosse

Selenium based search engine and crawler with offline archiving.

• Website: https://sosse.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
• Source Code: https://gitlab.com/biolds1/sosse
• License: AGPL-3.0
• Platform: Python/Docker

Typesense

Blazing fast, typo-tolerant open source search engine optimized for developer happiness and ease of use.

• Website: https://typesense.org
• Source Code: https://github.com/typesense/typesense
• License: GPL-3.0
• Platform: C++/Docker/K8S/deb

Websurfx

Aggregate results from other search engines (metasearch engine) without ads while keeping privacy and security in mind. It is extremely fast and provides a high level of customization (alternative to SearX).

• Website: https://github.com/neon-mmd/websurfx
• License: AGPL-3.0
• Platform: Rust/Docker
• Note: ⚠ Anti-features

Whoogle

A self-hosted, ad-free, privacy-respecting metasearch engine.

• Website: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search
• License: MIT
• Platform: Python
• Note: ⚠ Anti-features

Yacy

Peer based, decentralized search engine server.

• Website: https://yacy.net/en/index.html
• Source Code: https://github.com/yacy/yacy_search_server
• License: GPL-2.0
• Platform: Java/Docker/K8S

ZincSearch

Search engine that requires minimal resources (alternative to Elasticsearch).

• Website: https://zincsearch.com
• Demo: https://github.com/zinclabs/zinc#playground-server
• Source Code: https://github.com/zincsearch/zincsearch
• License: Apache-2.0
• Platform: Go/Docker/K8S