47
submitted 1 month ago by Prunebutt@slrpnk.net to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml

Don't know if this is the right comm. Let me know if there's a better one.

Inthe last few days I noticed that the results of some public searxng instances has gotten way worse (mostly cyrillic/chinese text when searching english text with :en).

Does anyone else have that problem? Die google start the next anti-consumer tactic to push their AI garbage?

top 22 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] potatoguy@lemmy.eco.br 19 points 1 month ago

This might be Bing, i noticed that Bing always returns the worst thing possible.

I configure the engines to use brave, duckduckgo, google, qwant and yahoo, always give me good results, might be the law of large numbers in action.

[-] elvith@feddit.org 8 points 1 month ago

Second that. I'm self hosting my own instance. If I only get some kanji (or sometimes, but very rare) cyrillic results, they're usually by bing

[-] hansolo@lemmy.today 4 points 1 month ago

DDG is just Bing results. I thiiink Qwant might be as well.

[-] potatoguy@lemmy.eco.br 6 points 1 month ago

They do some treatment to the results too + internal data from them, it's not copy pasted from Bing, so the results turn out different for duckduckgo and other Bing downstream search engines.

[-] rozodru@piefed.social 12 points 1 month ago

I run my own SearX instance (https://searx.andmc.ca) and really haven't noticed "worse" results. Granted I haven't really touched the configuration in several weeks but it's been working fine for me. There's nothing special about my instance either it's just straight up default settings for almost everything.

Maybe it's just whatever instances you're using? I don't know. I mean feel free to give mine a shot to see if it's any better.

[-] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That one is indeed better. Interesting how my default ones have these problems.

Maybe I should spin up an instance on my VPS as well, when I find the time.

edit: Thanks for sharing, btw! ^^

[-] rozodru@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago

it's very easy to setup. for me it took me all of like 5minutes via docker and like I said I didn't change much at all, if anything really.

[-] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago

The "easy things to set up" are just currently piling up. ;)

[-] Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 month ago

I've noticed this too.

My assumption is that it might be mostly Chinese instances being hosted, configured to return such results, but it's just a hunch.

How do you use SearXNG btw?

I use instance randomizers,
so each query goes through a random SearXNG instance, e.g:

GimmeASearX could help here,
since you can white/blacklist instances you want to use, but that can become tedious.

Searloc + Neocities are great for mobile devices and other places where you can't self host GimmeASearX.

[-] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 month ago

Those instance randomizers seem like a good idea, thanks!

[-] socialsecurity@piefed.social 7 points 1 month ago

It is an aggregator... So Bing and Google are just being enshitified

[-] SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 month ago

Also what servers do you use?

[-] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I don't know if I'm doing them a favour by increasing their traffic, so I'd rather not say. ;)

[-] SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 month ago

Yeah nothing but random results. I had to switch to ddg for now.

[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 points 1 month ago

I think it's pretty obvious that it's not their doing and rather downstream search APIs. I'd reach out to their development team.

[-] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yeah, that's what I figured. I wanted to ask in a "lower stakes" forum first, though. To find out if the issue is already known.

Just not to annoy the devs with an issue report that's already been reported (and which report I overlooked)

[-] parmesancrabs@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago

Yeah I think it's similar to YouTube where specific JavaScript functionality is required to execute in order to collect results from Google. This impacts others like Whoogle too unfortunately.

[-] monovergent@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

Can confirm, still getting results in English, but most of my preferred instances (granted I have a bias for ones with shorter URLs) have been returning unusable results. Google's rate-limiting mechanism is probably hitting them hard.

Hopefully the SearXNG devs can find a workaround soon, but it might be time for me to consider self-hosting or taking a look at kagi. I personally can't put up with plain DDG since its autocorrect is too aggressive.

[-] mistermodal@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

Time to play around with the settings or host your own. This is the most important service we have IMO, so it is very much worth hosting

[-] ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

I have noticed an increase in bad certificates also. Crappy unrelated results too.

[-] ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

I found that it can help to put the most important words first. But really, I just switched to swisscows. It is also good for work since it auto filters NSFW content.

this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
47 points (94.3% liked)

DeGoogle Yourself

14340 readers
9 users here now

A community for those that would like to get away from Google.

Here you may post anything related to DeGoogling, why we should do it or good software alternatives!

Rules

  1. Be respectful even in disagreement

  2. No advertising unless it is very relevent and justified. Do not do this excessively.

  3. No low value posts / memes. We or you need to learn, or discuss something.

Related communities

!privacyguides@lemmy.one !privacy@lemmy.ml !privatelife@lemmy.ml !linuxphones@lemmy.ml !fossdroid@social.fossware.space !fdroid@lemmy.ml

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS