## SearxNG Search API

This page covers how to use the SearxNG search API within LangChain. It is broken into two parts: installation and setup, and then references to the specific SearxNG API wrapper.

## Installation and Setup[​](#installation-and-setup "Direct link to Installation and Setup")

While it is possible to utilize the wrapper in conjunction with [public searx instances](https://searx.space/) these instances frequently do not permit API access (see note on output format below) and have limitations on the frequency of requests. It is recommended to opt for a self-hosted instance instead.

### Self Hosted Instance:[​](#self-hosted-instance "Direct link to Self Hosted Instance:")

See [this page](https://searxng.github.io/searxng/admin/installation.html) for installation instructions.

When you install SearxNG, the only active output format by default is the HTML format. You need to activate the `json` format to use the API. This can be done by adding the following line to the `settings.yml` file:

```
search:    formats:        - html        - json
```

You can make sure that the API is working by issuing a curl request to the API endpoint:

`curl -kLX GET --data-urlencode q='langchain' -d format=json http://localhost:8888`

This should return a JSON object with the results.

## Wrappers[​](#wrappers "Direct link to Wrappers")

### Utility[​](#utility "Direct link to Utility")

To use the wrapper we need to pass the host of the SearxNG instance to the wrapper with:

```
1. the named parameter `searx_host` when creating the instance.2. exporting the environment variable `SEARXNG_HOST`.
```

You can use the wrapper to get results from a SearxNG instance.

```
from langchain_community.utilities import SearxSearchWrappers = SearxSearchWrapper(searx_host="http://localhost:8888")s.run("what is a large language model?")
```

### Tool[​](#tool "Direct link to Tool")

You can also load this wrapper as a Tool (to use with an Agent).

You can do this with:

```
from langchain.agents import load_toolstools = load_tools(["searx-search"],                    searx_host="http://localhost:8888",                    engines=["github"])
```

Note that we could _optionally_ pass custom engines to use.

If you want to obtain results with metadata as _json_ you can use:

```
tools = load_tools(["searx-search-results-json"],                    searx_host="http://localhost:8888",                    num_results=5)
```

#### Quickly creating tools[​](#quickly-creating-tools "Direct link to Quickly creating tools")

This examples showcases a quick way to create multiple tools from the same wrapper.

```
from langchain_community.tools.searx_search.tool import SearxSearchResultswrapper = SearxSearchWrapper(searx_host="**")github_tool = SearxSearchResults(name="Github", wrapper=wrapper,                            kwargs = {                                "engines": ["github"],                                })arxiv_tool = SearxSearchResults(name="Arxiv", wrapper=wrapper,                            kwargs = {                                "engines": ["arxiv"]                                })
```

For more information on tools, see [this page](https://python.langchain.com/docs/modules/tools/).

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