Experimenting with a Self-Hosted Deep Research Agent (n8n + SearXNG + Gemini 2.0)

[TAN_YONG_SHENG]

I tried replicating this n8n deep research template but made some modifications to cut costs and improve flexibility:

• Cheaper Model: Used Gemini-2.0-Flash-Thinking-Exp instead of OpenAI o3.
• Self-Hosted Search: Integrated SearXNG to enable an “Academic” search function.

Info of my setup: Blog post

You can try the demo yourself here: Research form

Outputs & Observations

• Generated Research Results: Notion Output
• Some outputs look promising, while others have display issues:
  • Well-Formatted Example: Good Articles
  • Bad Formatting Issues: Bad Articles

Conclusion

This is still an ongoing experiment, mainly focused on switching to a cheaper model while maintaining research quality. Not everything is fact-checked yet, and there are formatting issues to fix.

Would love to hear your thoughts! Let’s discuss.

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EDITED: I encountered numerous rate limit errors with this experimental deep research tool yesterday. To address this, I attempted to add more Gemini API keys for load balancing, hoping it would help mitigate the issue.

[headset907]

Hi @TAN_YONG_SHENG great project!
I’m curious, you’re talking about Self-Hosted Search with SearXNG, were you able to implement it and if yes how did you do it? (I’m running a searxng instance)
Are you using a community node like n8n-nodes-searxng?
I thought it was not working, I did try as well.
I would greatly appreciate more details!
Thank you for keeping me posted

Custom Node as an AI tool

Describe the problem/error/question I am working on a custom node that AI tool would need to use. It’s an SearXNG tool: Analog to SerpApi. It performs a search request. I can see the node in the list of AI tools after adding a usableAsTool: true to the node source code (like in NocoDB standard tool). I can add the NocoDB as a tool and it works perfectly fine, but not the custom SearXNG node. What is the error message (if any)? Once I run a test on the workflow, it fails after the trigger wi…

[TAN_YONG_SHENG]

Hi @headset907, thanks for your compliment. No, I just use http node to send request to my localhost searxng instance.

For example,

curl -X GET "http://localhost:8080/search?q=heart+disease&format=json"

Here is the set up of my searxng instance: https://www.tanyongsheng.com/note/setting-up-searxng-on-windows-localhost-your-private-customizable-search-engine/

[headset907]

ah ok I understand, that’s great! thanks a lot man!