Alternative web search aggregator: metasearch

[felladrin]

Something to keep in mind, it case it's useful later.

• Repository: https://github.com/mat-1/metasearch2
• Demo: https://s.matdoes.dev
• Developed in Rust. Single binary.
• Could be used in place of SearXNG, which would allow using some Linux docker image other than Alpine (used by SearXNG docker image).

[felladrin]

Closing this one: we're staying with SearXNG.

The Alpine motivation doesn't apply to us. Our Dockerfile doesn't use SearXNG's official image, it builds SearXNG from a pinned commit on top of node:lts-slim, which is Debian. So there is no Alpine image here to replace.

The expensive part is server/webSearchService.ts. It reads SearXNG's unresponsive_engines field to tell "the engines are rate-limited or hit a CAPTCHA" apart from "there are genuinely no results for this query". That distinction is what makes /search answer 502 instead of an empty array, and the retry budget, the circuit breaker, the /status counter and the matrix in docs/failure-injection.md all depend on it. Image search has the same kind of dependency on the category field (videos takes thumbnail + iframe_src, everything else takes thumbnail_src + img_src).

So the switch means rewriting that module and its 671 lines of tests, plus the degradation docs and the 15 files that name SearXNG.

The benefit is real but smaller than it looked: a Rust single binary would drop python3, python3-venv, git and openssl from the image, along with the clone and the pip install. If that build complexity is what bothers us, there is a cheaper fix: install SearXNG from a release tarball instead of cloning it, which removes git and the commit pin.

For reference, I didn't check whether metasearch2 exposes a JSON API, image results, a health endpoint, or per-engine failure reporting. If it ever has all four, this is worth reopening.