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Official Verified utilities Safety 4/5

searxng-web-search

Search the web using a self-hosted SearXNG metasearch engine. Use when the user asks to search the web, find information online, look up recent news, research a topic, or needs current data from the internet. Also use when the agent needs to gather external context to answer a question. Requires a running SearXNG instance with JSON API enabled.

Why use this skill?

Integrate private, self-hosted web search into your OpenClaw agents. Use SearXNG to aggregate results from 243+ search services for accurate, real-time data analysis.

skill-install — Terminal

Install via CLI (Recommended)

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/gangtao/searxng-web-search
Or

What This Skill Does

The searxng-web-search skill provides OpenClaw agents with the capability to perform privacy-respecting, decentralized web searches. By leveraging a self-hosted SearXNG instance, the agent acts as a metasearch coordinator, pulling data from over 243 different search services simultaneously. This allows the AI to synthesize information from a wide variety of sources without being locked into a single index or subject to corporate tracking. It is an essential utility for agents requiring real-time knowledge, fact-checking, or current event updates.

Installation

To integrate this skill, ensure you have a running SearXNG instance with JSON formatting enabled in your configuration file. Install the skill using the ClawHub CLI command: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/gangtao/searxng-web-search. Once installed, verify that the environment variables (specifically SEARXNG_BASE_URL) are correctly mapped to your local or remote instance. The skill requires the standard Python requests library to bridge the communication between your agent and the SearXNG API endpoint.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for research-intensive tasks. Use it when you need to summarize current news, gather technical documentation from multiple forums, or compare data points across diverse websites. It is particularly effective for agents that need to provide neutral, non-personalized search results or for users who maintain their own privacy-focused search infrastructure.

Example Prompts

  1. "Search for the latest research papers published on large language model efficiency released in the last 48 hours."
  2. "Find recent news articles regarding the integration of renewable energy in European cities and summarize the key findings."
  3. "Look up the current documentation standards for the latest Python release and provide a bulleted summary of new features."

Tips & Limitations

To optimize performance, configure the SEARXNG_MAX_RESULTS variable to match your specific needs, as higher values increase latency. Note that this skill requires an external network connection to your SearXNG instance. If your SearXNG instance is slow, consider enabling its caching feature. Additionally, while SearXNG preserves user privacy, the agent's interaction with the search results should still follow your established data handling policies. Always ensure your settings.yml has the json format explicitly enabled to ensure the agent can parse the incoming data correctly.

Metadata

Author@gangtao
Stars2387
Views1
Updated2026-03-09
View Author Profile
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Add to Configuration

Paste this into your clawhub.json to enable this plugin.

{
  "plugins": {
    "official-gangtao-searxng-web-search": {
      "enabled": true,
      "auto_update": true
    }
  }
}

Tags(AI)

#search#web-scraping#privacy#research#metasearch
Safety Score: 4/5

Flags: network-access, external-api