elumenotion/guideants/searxng-search

searxng-search

Paths - fixed layout, do not probe or re-derive. The sandbox CWD is the notebook's output directory. This skill's scripts live under Skills/searxng-search/scripts/ relative to it, so run the commands in this file exactly as written. Write every deliverable to the CWD with a bare filename: never prefix an output path with Output/ - the CWD is the output directory, so Output/... would create a nested Output/ folder.

Searches web text and images through the GuideAnts stack's own self-hosted SearXNG - the same instance the product's web-search / ReadWeb tools are wired to. Stdlib Python only (urllib): no pip installs, no API keys.

How the instance is wired (verified against this repo)

--base-url or the SEARXNG_URL environment variable overrides the default, so the skill also works against any other SearXNG instance (public or self-hosted).

Dependencies

Python 3 standard library only. The only prerequisite is that the stack is up and readweb-searxng is running.

What to run

Probe first (cheap; confirms the instance answers with JSON):

python3 Skills/searxng-search/scripts/searxng_tool.py probe

Web search:

python3 Skills/searxng-search/scripts/searxng_tool.py search "duck" --limit 10
python3 Skills/searxng-search/scripts/searxng_tool.py search "python async" --engines bing,duckduckgo --time-range week
python3 Skills/searxng-search/scripts/searxng_tool.py search "fastapi" --json   # raw JSON for parsing

Image search (list direct image URLs):

python3 Skills/searxng-search/scripts/searxng_tool.py images "duck" --list 10

Image search + download the top hits into the notebook:

python3 Skills/searxng-search/scripts/searxng_tool.py images "duck" --download 2 --prefix duck

Flags

Behavior notes (observed live)

• Image queries return ~100+ results; useful engines are bing images,

duckduckgo images, openverse, wikicommons.images. Expect some engines to be suspended (brave: too many requests, startpage: CAPTCHA) - that is normal upstream noise and is printed in the report.

• Downloads send a browser-like User-Agent plus the result page as

Referer (several CDNs 403 without it), then verify the response by magic bytes (JPEG / PNG / WebP / GIF) before saving, and report width x height. The file extension comes from the sniffed bytes, not the URL.

Failure modes

• cannot reach SearXNG (connection error) - the stack is not up or the

port binding changed. Verify on the host: docker ps shows readweb-searxng and http://127.0.0.1:8091/search?q=test&format=json answers 200. Then retry via host.docker.internal:8091, or pass --base-url for another instance.

• HTTP 403/429 - limiter/abuse control is enabled on that instance; the

repo config has limiter: false.

• no JSON returned - the instance config is missing formats: [json].
• image skipped during download - printed with the reason (403, HTML

error page, non-image bytes); the tool moves on to the next result.

Reporting

State the base URL used, the result count (plus which engines answered or were suspended), and the exact CWD filenames of any downloaded images (the UI displays them under Output/). If nothing could be downloaded, say why, per the failure modes above.