Oddbean new post about login | logout @f86354ac Couple problems here, bc you're claiming to know things that ostensibly you can't possibly know. 1. Searx instances don't source Yandex 2. The extent of NATO alignment in India/Asia 3. The extent of Western firewall capabilities
@be846a9f Searx is a metasearch engine rather than a search engine. It relies on querying the engines you can see in the preferences area https://search.gcomm.ch/searx/preferences. From what I know about these available engines, they are all in NATO aligned countries, but you can tell me if you see differently. I do not know the full extent of Western firewall capabilities nor what is implemented. I understand how firewalls can impede crawling, but how can a firewall affect a query or the results from Yandex?
@f86354ac Ooh.. I just revisited searx.space and the Indian instances are unlisted... searching the commits for the page sources for the dates and edits...
@f86354ac When I'm saying "firewall" I'm not just talking about a tech idea. What we learned thru RT is that the western FVEY sets up an incentive structure for Eastern alts to present a Western aligned English version of news. When a source deviates, or an arbitrary editorial decision is made to end the program, it's removed from easy viewing (sometimes completely by domain), increasingly difficult to see eastern views. See rt, telesur, press TV, and the assassinations and coercion tactics...
@be846a9f TMK regardless of their hosting location, the instances listed on searx.space all use the same Searx or SearxNG code. The available search engines are hard coded. So you can never get results from Yandex via a Searx query unless you fork it to provide that engine. Engines can and do downrank/suppress results from different sources, but much of that is a black box to us.
@f86354ac Reading the searxng/searx/settings.yml Leads the reader to believe you can configure/add any search engine you want. The docs suggest replacements available for the search_url
@be846a9f You are right.😃 Thank you for showing me. The instance admin can maintain the YAML to adjust the available engines. Maybe after I resolve some other technical issues on my board, I will spin up another SearxNG instance.
@f86354ac I went thru the history of searx space commits to see why they purge/add sources... there's no coherent logic. Many of the instances they remove are still there.