searx.be and results in Russian? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by monovergent@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Been using searx.be for a bit now and they had many results in Dutch and German, which can be expected for a site based in Belgium. But does anyone notice an influx of results in Russian? Did they change the server location or are users in Russia catching on to it? Yandex isn't toggled on in the settings either.

Not trying to judge security by language. I just kinda liked having results in a mix of languages I could read.

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[-] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

According to their page it's a pure searxng instance. I didn't see anything on my own instance changing so there are three options I see:

The mentioned server side changes (e.g. A server move you mentioned but could also be server settings, provider settings, etc).
client side changes: somehow your Firefox provides different information to alter the results
subjective change: it's always a possibility that either what you searched or your perception was more fine tuned to Cyrillic.

And then there's the obligatory "none or all of the above".

Personally I'd guess it's just a fluke. I gave it a few searches from Firefox mobile on "all languages" and had a mix of mainly English and a bit of German und French in there as results.

Edit: if you're comfortable with that feel free to share some search terms and we can compare results. Would be curious myself!

[-] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago

The mentioned server side changes (e.g. A server move you mentioned but could also be server settings, provider settings, etc).

I guess that is the case. According to https://searx.space/ the searx.be server is in Austria but might use some proxy to talk to Google and similar to avoid quick blocking. The maintainer of searx.be also maintains yewtu.be and that one uses proxies (The proxy names can be seen when blocking auto play of videos in Tor browser).

Also getting results in Russian here since a few days. Usually it is either Swedish or Dutch. Never German.

this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024

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