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submitted 2 days ago by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml

[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?

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[-] MangoPenguin 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2025
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