Open source search-engine projects
Every project in the registry tagged search-engine, ranked by real GitHub adoption.
The leading distributed search and analytics engine
Privacy-first metasearch across 270+ sources
🦔 Fast, lightweight & schema-less search backend. An alternative to Elasticsearch that runs on a few MBs of RAM.
AI-native vector database for intuitive applications
A lightweight, lightning-fast, in-process vector database
Open-source search and analytics at enterprise scale
Lightning-fast open source search engine for big data
Minimalistic AI-powered search engine for instant answers
Developer-friendly OSS embedded retrieval library for multimodal AI. Search More; Manage Less.
Lightning-fast search for massive datasets
Full-text & vector search at the edge.
Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results
Infinispan is an open source data grid platform and highly scalable NoSQL cloud data store.
⚡️ A fully-featured and blazing-fast PHP API client to interact with Algolia.
Related tags
Frequently asked questions
How many open source search-engine projects are there?
This registry tracks 14 projects tagged search-engine, with 252,929 GitHub stars between them. The most-adopted is Elasticsearch at 78,462 stars.
Are these search-engine projects free to use?
Yes — 11 of the 14 carry an explicit open-source licence across 5 distinct licences, so there is no licence fee. Where a project also sells a hosted or enterprise version, the self-hosted path remains free.
Which search-engine project should I choose?
The list above is ranked by GitHub stars, but stars measure attention rather than fit. Check three things on each card: the licence (permissive versus copyleft), the language it is written in, and the last-push date — a high-star project that has not been pushed in a year is a liability.
Are these search-engine projects still maintained?
14 of the 14 were pushed in the last 90 days, and every card shows its exact last-push date so you can see the rest. Sort your shortlist by that date before committing to a migration.