Configuring SearxNG to use Unobtanium

SearxNG is a metasearch engine that can combine the results of multiple search engines.

To configure an Unobtanium instance for searx one can use the json_engine module and the fact that all HTML views of unobtanium can be turned into an API by passing in format=json as an additional URL query parameter.

Add the following to the engines: list in the settings.yaml file of SearxNG and replace unobtanium.rocks with the domain name of your preferred instance for the search_url and website.

  - name: unobtanium
    engine: json_engine
    shortcut: uo
    categories: general
    paging: true
    search_url: https://unobtanium.rocks/search?format=json&search={query}&page={pageno}
    results_query: list
    title_query: title
    url_query: url
    content_query: description
    categories: [general, web]
    timeout: 3
    about:
      website: https://unobtanium.rocks
      use_official_api: true
      require_api_key: false
      results: JSON

Depending on how big your database and how fast your server is you may want to adjust the timeout option. While in general unobtanium is pretty fast for most queries, it is possible to submit queries that take a long time to complete.