| name | searxng-news-research |
| skill_type | skill |
| description | Time-sensitive news and topic monitoring via the searxng-mcp MCP server. Use when the agent must gather what multiple news/social engines are currently reporting on a topic — breaking events, product/security announcements, or ongoing coverage — by scoping `web_search` to the `news`/`social_media` categories and paging for breadth. Do NOT use for evergreen reference facts (use searxng-web-search), academic sources (scholarx), or deep single-source reads (web-fetch). |
| license | MIT |
| tags | ["searxng","news","monitoring","research","metasearch","mcp"] |
| metadata | {"author":"Genius","version":"0.1.0"} |
SearXNG News Research
News- and topic-monitoring workflow over the searxng-mcp server. Same web_search
tool as general search, but scoped to the news (and optionally social_media)
categories and paged to collect broad, recent coverage from many outlets at once.
When to use
- Track breaking events or ongoing coverage of a topic across many outlets.
- Sweep recent announcements (releases, CVEs, incidents) before summarizing.
- Build a dated reading list of candidate articles to fetch and synthesize.
When NOT to use
- Stable reference facts / general lookups →
searxng-web-search.
- Peer-reviewed or preprint literature →
scholarx.
- Reading / extracting one known article in full →
web-fetch / web-crawler.
- Structured social-platform pulls (X/Reddit/YouTube/HN) →
pulselink-mcp.
Prerequisites & environment
Connect via the mcp-client skill against the searxng-mcp MCP server. Same env
matrix as searxng-web-search (SEARXNG_INSTANCE_URL, USE_RANDOM_INSTANCE,
SEARXNG_USERNAME/SEARXNG_PASSWORD, SEARXNG_KG_INGEST, MCP_TOOL_MODE). For news
freshness, prefer a self-hosted SEARXNG_INSTANCE_URL so JSON output is not rate-limited.
Tools & actions
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|
web_search | Metasearch, scoped via categories:["news"]. |
searxng_ingest_search | Same search + persist results to the KG (for a monitoring corpus). |
Key parameters
query — the topic/entity to monitor.
categories — ["news"] (add "social_media" for chatter).
pageno — increment to widen coverage; news pages fall off fast, so 1–3 pages is typical.
language — outlet language, default en-US.
Recipes
Latest news on a topic:
{"query": "openbao 2.0 release", "categories": ["news"]}
News + social chatter, page 2:
{"query": "kubernetes 1.31 CVE", "categories": ["news", "social_media"], "pageno": 2}
Monitor + persist into the KG for later synthesis (via searxng_ingest_search):
{"query": "nvidia gb10 availability", "categories": ["news"]}
Gotchas
- Not every engine dates its results — sort/filter on
publishedDate when present, but
expect gaps; treat ordering as relevance, not strict recency.
- News results churn fast: capture URLs you care about immediately (or ingest them) —
a repeat query minutes later may return a different set.
- The
news category depends on which engines the instance enables; a locked-down
instance may return sparse news — switch SEARXNG_INSTANCE_URL if coverage is thin.
Related
searxng-web-search — general (non-news) metasearch.
searxng-kg-ingestion — persist a monitoring corpus into the knowledge graph.
web-fetch / web-crawler — read the full article behind a result URL.