Why is every Searx instance down when I try to use it?
HaleyHalcyon@kbin.social to 
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.
Doesn't this defeat the privacy of searx because it's coming from a single IP and a single user?
Can that be done on a mobile device?
You could in theory but hosting it on dedicated hardware will be a much better experience.
+1 to self hosting or using a vps.
Does that help with the engine connection errors?
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.
I believe Bing is making changes to accomodate Chat GPT
This is why I don't use searxng as my daily driver! I'm too lazy to self host and they're always down.
Searx.space has a whole bunch of instances. 92 online right now.
I use search.sapti.me as my instance and I've never had an issue with it
Problem is that this kind of alternative web interfaces for Google are just going web scraping of the regular www.google.com page. They are not using the Google Search API (which is paid and requires an API key). However, Google says scraping of their search results is not allowed. And they are actually preventing it by blocking IPs doing too many search request in certain amount of time. That is the main reason a lot of Searx or SearxNG instances stop working after a certain time.
i feel this too, i tried using searx for a while and found it really nice but frequently down or broken :/ i’ll try some of the instances suggested here.
I’m pretty sure the instance I use (searx.org) still works (at least for me it does) but it does result in empty search result pages most of the time due to this bug (I think)