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.

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.

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.

@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...