FAQ.
The honest answers — private search, the AI, the wallet, access, the token, and where to find us.
It's the architecture. Searxly runs a real search engine (SearXNG) locally on your Mac and aggregates results on-device. There's no Searxly server in the middle keeping logs of your queries, because the server is your computer. No accounts, no analytics, no telemetry.
No. The SearXNG engine is built into Searxly as a self-contained, signed runtime — no extra apps, no dependencies, nothing to set up. One click and Searxly creates your private instance, generates a strong secret, deploys its theme, and starts it on 127.0.0.1 for you.
Those still route your query through their servers — you're trusting a company's promise. Searxly removes the company. A real SearXNG engine runs on your Mac and aggregates results from many engines on-device, so the thing that knows what you searched is a computer you own. It's privacy you can verify, not just trust.
When you search a known person, company, product or place, Searxly builds a card beside your results — a summary, key facts and a banner pulled from Grokipedia, plus the verified official site from a curated, auditable entity database. It's keyed to the entity, never to you, and you can flag a correction with "Improve this panel."
Yes — ad & tracker blocking and content-safety filtering are built into the core, on by design, alongside a local, encrypted password vault. The privacy tools aren't add-ons you hunt for in settings; the safe choice is the default.
A WireGuard VPN is built into the app — but shipping an in-app VPN on macOS requires an Apple entitlement, and the Apple Developer Program review is still pending. Until that clears, we recommend a trusted third-party VPN; Proton VPN is a solid choice for basic use. (SearXNG can also route its outgoing search traffic over Tor in the meantime.)
Yes. Keys are generated from a standard BIP-39 phrase and encrypted on your device. They never leave it — not to us, not to a cloud, not to anyone. Your recovery phrase is yours alone. We literally cannot move your funds.
Five EVM networks today — Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum and Polygon — all from one recovery phrase. You can also import private keys, add watch-only addresses, set price alerts, and connect to dApps with origin-bound approvals and a built-in phishing guard.
Searxly is free to download for macOS (Apple Silicon) — no account, no waitlist, no gate. Grab it from the download page. An optional paid Maximum edition adds extra hardening.
No. It's a community token that funds development. It is not a security, not an investment, and not a promise of profit. Crypto is volatile and you can lose everything you put in. Only ever interact with the verified contract address, and do your own research.
Searxly doesn't ship a chatbot. Instead it exposes its private browsing — web search, page reading, knowledge lookup and, opt-in, real browser actions — as tools your own local AI can call over the Model Context Protocol. Bring Ollama, LM Studio or any MCP client; everything runs on your Mac and nothing is sent to any AI company. Read more →
No. Searxly runs no model and picks no model. It runs a small tool server on your machine — loopback-only, token-gated, off by default — that your own local AI connects to. The intelligence is entirely yours; Searxly just answers the tools your model calls and routes them through your own private search. The tools are open and auditable; the privacy is the point.
No. Your prompts and chat live in your own AI client, not in Searxly. The tool server only receives the specific tool calls your model makes, runs them locally through your own SearXNG and browser, and writes them to an activity log you can read. Nothing is sent to a Searxly server, and the server is off until you turn it on.
The source is published for transparency and review. Searxly is a native macOS app today (Apple Silicon), built with SwiftUI + WebKit.
Need direct help? Contact support and we'll reply by email. To chat, join the community: the Telegram channel for announcements, the Telegram community and Discord server to chat, and @Searxly on X. Those are the only official channels — anything else claiming to be Searxly isn't.