SearXNG in Rust

A new open-source project called metadata-search-engine-rs is basically a homemade search middleman: type in a query, and it asks several big search sites at once, merges the results, removes duplicates, and sends back one cleaned-up list. In plain English, it’s trying to give people a SearXNG-style search tool without needing the original Python-based setup. And the comments? Oh, they immediately turned this into a mini culture war.

One camp was thrilled. One user flat-out said they’d been looking for exactly this because they didn’t want to embed the original SearXNG as a Python package. Another crowd favorite was the surprisingly passionate applause for what the project doesn’t have: no obvious generative AI gimmicks. Yes, really — commenters were celebrating the absence of AI like it was a plot twist season finale. One even joked that the naming slip, calling it a “metadata” engine instead of a meta search engine, was somehow also a reassuring sign that AI hadn’t been allowed near the keyboard.

Then came the reality check. A worried commenter asked the question hanging over every scraper project: won’t the big search engines just hit this thing with captchas and anti-bot blocks? That anxiety gave the thread its main tension — is this a liberating privacy-friendly tool, or just a fast pass to getting pseudo-banned by every major search site?

And in a dramatic cameo, the original Searx creator popped in to plug Hister, a newer project with a bigger ambition: build your own private search index instead of leaning on the big engines at all. Suddenly the thread wasn’t just “cool Rust project,” it was a debate over the future of search itself.