I want to use SearxNG as my daily driver, and I added three instances to my browser’s search engines list. However, I find that all three are down whenever I try to use it, and I inevitably have to look at the list of instances and click the top one just to perform one search. Is there a way to “auto-route” my search through the most reliable instance or something?
My solution to this was to run my own private instance. It’s very easy with docker-compose.
Does that help with the engine connection errors?
I self-host my own SearXNG instance and haven’t had any errors like that in the ~6 months it’s been running. It’s just anecdotal evidence, but I would imagine any such low-traffic instance would be able to avoid the blocking and other issues that high-traffic instances run into.
I’ve never thought of it like that. Another service for the homelab to run.
I still have some issues with Bing from time to time but as far as I can tell that’s because they are changing stuff and the SearXNG devs just need to push a fix.
+1 to self hosting or using a vps.
Can that be done on a mobile device?
You could in theory but hosting it on dedicated hardware will be a much better experience.
Mobile or desktop? Libredirect on desktop allows you to enable a ton of pre-populated Searx instances in the Search category, so it will use any of the enabled instances in your list.
I don’t believe it picks based on reliability but it at least saves you the time of manually picking/editing your instances. If one is troublesome, just remove it from the list.
This is why I don’t use searxng as my daily driver! I’m too lazy to self host and they’re always down.