Your website deserves its own search engine¶
Dead Simple Search is an open source, self-hosted search engine backend built with Python and MySQL. It crawls your site, indexes your content, and gives you a fast full-text search API — all under your control.
Why Dead Simple Search?¶
Not everyone needs a massive cloud search service. Maybe you run a personal site, a small business, or an internal knowledge base. Maybe you care about where your data lives. Maybe you just want something you can actually understand.
Dead Simple Search is built for people who want a search engine that does its job without the complexity. No PhD required, no vendor lock-in, no surprise bills.
🔍 Full-text search¶
Uses MySQL's built-in full-text indexing (that's the technology that lets databases find words inside large blocks of text very quickly). Supports both natural language and boolean search modes.
🕷️ Smart crawler¶
Automatically discovers and crawls your website. Respects robots.txt (a file that tells bots which pages they're allowed to visit), follows sitemaps, and stays polite with configurable request delays.
🌐 REST API¶
A clean JSON API (a way for programs to talk to each other using web requests) for everything: adding sites, triggering crawls, and searching. Easy to connect to any front-end or application.
🏠 Fully self-hosted¶
Runs on your own server. Your data never leaves your infrastructure. No tracking, no analytics, no third-party dependencies at runtime.
⚙️ Simple stack¶
Python, Flask, and MySQL — technologies that have been around for decades and are well understood. No exotic dependencies, no complex setup.
📖 Open source¶
Licensed under MIT. Read every line of code, modify it, contribute back, or fork it entirely. It's yours.
Who is this for?¶
Dead Simple Search is a great fit if you:
- Run a small to medium website and want search without paying for a cloud service
- Care about digital sovereignty — knowing exactly where your data is and who has access to it
- Prefer open source software you can inspect, modify, and trust
- Want to save money by avoiding monthly search-as-a-service fees
- Need a simple, reliable tool rather than an over-engineered platform
- Like to learn by working with a codebase that's small enough to read in an afternoon
How it works, in plain language¶
- You register a website by telling Dead Simple Search the domain and starting page
- The crawler visits your pages — it reads the HTML, follows links, and discovers your content
- The indexer extracts what matters — titles, headings, descriptions, and the main text of each page
- You search via the API — send a query, get back ranked results with relevance scores
That's it. No pipeline of microservices, no message queues, no container orchestration. Just a Python app and a MySQL database.
Get started¶
Dead Simple Search lives on Codeberg, a free and open platform for collaborative code hosting.
→ View the project on Codeberg
Ready to dive in? Head over to the getting started guide for step-by-step instructions.