Configure SearXNG

SearXNG is the web search backbone of Rabbit Hole. This guide covers enabling engines, tuning timeouts, and adjusting weights.

Configuration file location

config/searxng/settings.yml

Changes require a SearXNG restart to take effect:

docker restart searxng
# or, if using docker compose:
docker compose restart searxng

Enabling engines

Engines are disabled by default if SearXNG ships with them off. To enable:

engines:
  - name: brave
    engine: brave
    shortcut: br
    disabled: false

  - name: reddit
    engine: reddit
    shortcut: re
    disabled: false

  - name: github
    engine: github
    shortcut: gh
    disabled: false

  - name: stackoverflow
    engine: stackoverflow
    shortcut: so
    disabled: false

  - name: arxiv
    engine: arxiv
    shortcut: arxiv
    disabled: false

  - name: semantic scholar
    engine: semantic_scholar
    shortcut: se
    disabled: false

Engine categories

Each engine belongs to one or more categories. Categories determine which engines fire for a given searchWeb call:

Engine	Category
google, bing, brave, ddg	general
reddit, hackernews	social media
github, stackoverflow, archlinux wiki	it
arxiv, semantic scholar, pubmed	science
newsblur, google news	news
wikipedia, wikidata	general

Adjusting result weights

SearXNG uses Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF): score += weight / position. Increase a weight to surface that engine's results higher.

engines:
  - name: google
    weight: 1.2

  - name: wikipedia
    weight: 1.5

  - name: wikidata
    weight: 2.0

Tuning timeouts

outgoing:
  request_timeout: 4.0    # per-engine timeout (seconds)
  max_request_timeout: 8.0  # hard ceiling

Increase if fast engines are timing out. Decrease if you want fast responses and don't mind missing slow engines.

Enabling pagination

engines:
  - name: brave
    engine: brave
    max_page: 5  # allow up to page 5

Rabbit Hole sends pageno=2 on second-iteration gap-fill passes to fetch genuinely new results. Without max_page, SearXNG returns page 1 for any page request.

Language and locale

search:
  default_lang: en
  languages:
    - en

Rabbit Hole sends language=en with every request. Set this to match.

Suspended times (error recovery)

When an engine returns errors, SearXNG suspends it temporarily. Tune the backoff:

engines:
  - name: google
    suspended_times:
      SearxEngineResponseException: [0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
      SearxEngineCaptchaException: [86400, 172800]
      SearxEngineAPIException: [0, 0, 0, 0, 0]

Setting most values to 0 means the engine retries immediately — useful during development.

Removing low-quality engines

Remove or disable engines that return noisy results:

engines:
  - name: baidu
    disabled: true

  - name: yandex
    disabled: true

Testing your configuration

After restarting SearXNG, verify engines are active:

curl "http://ava:8888/search?q=test&format=json&categories=general" | jq '.results[].engine' | sort | uniq

You should see your enabled engines in the output.

Related

• SearXNG configuration reference — full settings reference
• Search functions reference — how searchWeb calls SearXNG