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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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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.

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2025
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