searxng

What This Skill Does

The searxng skill empowers your OpenClaw agent to perform privacy-conscious web searches by interfacing with a self-hosted SearXNG instance. Unlike traditional search APIs that require expensive subscriptions or proprietary tracking, SearXNG aggregates results from dozens of top-tier search engines including Google, Brave, and DuckDuckGo. This skill sends queries to your specified local or private instance, parses the results, and feeds them back into your agent’s context window. It is a fundamental tool for providing your agent with real-time, external information without compromising data privacy or incurring usage costs.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, use the OpenClaw management utility. Run the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/eg-yks/local-websearch-1. Once installed, you must define the SEARXNG_URL environment variable to point to your specific instance, for example: export SEARXNG_URL="http://your-searxng-host:8888". This ensures your agent knows exactly where to send web-search requests.

Use Cases

Use this skill whenever your agent needs to bridge the gap between its training data and current events. It is ideal for fetching the latest news, finding technical documentation, validating current pricing, or summarizing trending topics. Because it supports language flags, it is also highly effective for multi-lingual research tasks.

Example Prompts

1. "Search the web for the latest advancements in quantum computing released this month."
2. "Find information about the current documentation for Python 3.12 and provide a summary of the new features."
3. "Look up the stock price and recent market analysis for OpenClaw's primary tech competitors."

Tips & Limitations

To optimize performance, adjust the --count flag; smaller numbers result in faster context processing. Use the --lang flag to refine results for specific regions. Keep in mind that this skill relies on a stable network connection to your SearXNG instance. If your instance is down or configured incorrectly, the skill will be unable to return data. Because this is a metasearch aggregator, ensure your SearXNG instance is updated regularly to maintain compatibility with upstream search providers. Avoid using this for high-frequency bulk scraping, as this may trigger rate-limiting on the underlying engines aggregated by SearXNG.