Funny SearXNG behaviour
from pglpm@lemmy.ca to degoogle@lemmy.ml on 23 Aug 15:21
https://lemmy.ca/post/50293519

[I thought of posting this question here since it’s the result of my avoiding direct use of Google search. Moderators feel free to delete it if it doesn’t fit (apologies in that case).]

Just noticed something curious and somewhat funny with SearXNG: if I repeat the search, say by pressing several times enter in the search field containing a specific search string, then I get every time a different batch of results. Note that I’m using an existing server.

Can anyone explain to me why this happens, and how to avoid it? Does it depend on my specific settings?

#degoogle

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hansolo@lemmy.today on 23 Aug 16:02 next collapse

As I understand it, SearXNG instances are proxies, and can be proxies for multiple search engines at once. My guess would be that if the instance you’re using is aggregating more then one engine results, hitting enter over and over might just break the search with one of the engines and drop those results.

MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 23 Aug 16:16 next collapse

It’s likely switching which search engines it’s using in the background, since searxng is a proxy to multiple existing search engines.

You can specify which search engines to use in your user settings, so you could restrict it to only one.

That said they could just be broken too, none of the searxng instances I just tried return valid search results, just random broken results.

mike_wooskey@lemmy.thewooskeys.com on 23 Aug 16:30 next collapse

As others said, Searxng is a search proxy. Any given instance can be configured to return results from vary many sources. Why would the results vary with repeated identical search? Not sure, but perhaps a bit of randomness is in the algorithm of which sites yo return results from, or which order to display them in. Also possible: latency may vary and so for each search a different result set is retrieved first.

pglpm@lemmy.ca on 23 Aug 19:39 collapse

@hansolo@lemmy.today @MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone @mike_wooskey@lemmy.thewooskeys.com Thank you for the explanation! Makes complete sense now. I see that several search engines are selected in the settings, and their response time are also reported.

I must say this is a very interesting feature…