SearchMob

SearchMob gives you the experience of running your own SearXNG instance, but as a native Android app that runs entirely on your phone, with no SearchMob servers and no telemetry of any kind. It aggregates results from several search engines, acts as a privacy proxy so those engines see no cookies/identifier from you, and keeps anything it stores encrypted at rest (with an optional zero-knowledge mode).

What it does

- Private metasearch on your device. Queries are fanned out in parallel to DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Marginalia, Mwmbl, and Wikipedia (plus optional bring-your-own Brave, Mojeek, and Kagi API keys), then de-duplicated and re-ranked. The app proxies the requests: upstream engines see no cookies, no referrer, no user/device identifier, and a rotated User-Agent. It never scrapes Google. - Typo and "similar sounding" tolerance. A misspelled query surfaces a "Did you mean" suggestion, from the engines' own correction when offered, otherwise from a fully on-device corrector (phonetic + edit-distance over a bundled dictionary, enriched by your own history). No new outbound calls. - Your ranking, your bubble. Raise, lower, pin, or block any site; scope searches with named lenses (the ready-to-use sample scopes are installed by default and selectable before you even search); or import a subset of Brave Goggles. All rules stay on-device (encrypted), are applied locally to the results, and are exportable as JSON. - Search verticals. Category tabs for Web, News, Forums, and Academic: each is a scoped search over the same engines (a site: filter, no new third-party API) with a sensible default sort. In the app and on the served page (?vertical=). - Settings in your browser. The served results page has its own owner-only (loopback) Settings page mirroring the app: default sort, the AI-slop filter, the Wikipedia summary, suggestions, full domain-rule and scope management, Goggles import, and search-history view/clear. - No data ever leaves for us. No analytics, no crash/diagnostic reporting, no accounts, no ad IDs, no device identifiers. The only outbound traffic is the searches you run, plus an optional once-a-day update check to GitHub (on by default, routed through the privacy proxy) that you can turn off in Settings. - Always-on, battery-friendly. A native specialUse foreground service runs a loopback-only HTTP search server, restarts on boot, and is event-driven. It holds no wake-lock while idle, so the CPU sleeps and idle drain is near-zero. - Use it from your browser. The service exposes an OpenSearch descriptor, so you can set SearchMob as your browser's default search engine (Firefox/Fennec, Chromium browsers, or any browser via a manual template). The in-app guide gives copy-paste URLs and per-browser steps. - Customizable. In-app search UI plus light/dark/Material-You theming, per-engine toggles, and a home-screen search widget. Preferences persist across reboots. - Encrypted at rest, store-nothing by default. Search history is off by default; when enabled it's local-only, encrypted (SQLCipher + Android Keystore), user-purgeable, with an optional zero-knowledge passphrase. You can view your history in the app, delete individual entries, and export/import it as JSON to move it to a new device. BYO API keys are likewise encrypted at rest. (See the in-app About & privacy screen for the full methodology and caveats.)

License

Copyright © 2026 FlintWave

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0