Self-hosted Search Engines software

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

16 apps, ranked by GitHub stars weighted by maintenance health.

Alternatives to Google Search

ElasticSearch

Distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine.

Actively maintained ★ 78.5k SSPL-1.0 🐳 Docker~$20/mo

MeiliSearch

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

Actively maintained ★ 59.8k MIT 🐳 Docker~$10/mo

SearXNG

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

Actively maintained ★ 39.2k AGPL-3.0 🐳 Docker~$10/mo

Typesense

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

Actively maintained ★ 27.1k GPL-3.0 🐳 Docker~$10/mo

OpenSearch

Distributed and RESTful search engine.

Actively maintained ★ 13.9k Apache-2.0 🐳 Docker~$20/mo

Manticore Search

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

Actively maintained ★ 12.1k GPL-3.0 🐳 Docker~$10/mo

Hister

Personal web search engine with automatic indexing of visited websites. Supports offline local result previews, local files, multi-user handling and optional semantic search.

Actively maintained ★ 6.2k AGPL-3.0 🐳 Docker~$10/mo

Yacy

Peer based, decentralized search engine server.

Actively maintained ★ 4.1k GPL-2.0 🐳 Docker~$10/mo

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.

Actively maintained ★ 1.7k Apache-2.0 🐳 Docker~$10/mo

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).

Actively maintained ★ 1.2k AGPL-3.0 🐳 Docker~$10/mo

Fess

Powerful and easily deployable Enterprise Search Server.

Actively maintained ★ 1.1k Apache-2.0 🐳 Docker~$10/mo

bitmagnet

BitTorrent indexer, DHT crawler, content classifier and torrent search engine with web UI, GraphQL API and Servarr stack integration.

Maintained ★ 4.4k MIT 🐳 Docker~$10/mo

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.

Actively maintained ★ 768 Apache-2.0 🐳 Docker~$10/mo

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.

Maintained ★ 2.5k MIT 🐳 Docker~$10/mo

Amgix

Hybrid search engine built for flexible deployment and real-world messy data.

Actively maintained ★ 10 AGPL-3.0 🐳 Docker~$10/mo

Sosse

Selenium based search engine and crawler with offline archiving.

Maintained ★ 2 AGPL-3.0 🐳 Docker~$10/mo