Try different search engines. Start in the Preferences link in the upper right of the page. Pick the Engines link, and then you will see all of the general purpose search engines. There will be dozens.
DO NOT ENABLE ALL OF THEM. This is solved.
If you enable all of the engines you’ll probably get a 500 error which won’t go away until you remove all of your FreedomBox cookies.
Not all search engines are supported all the time. Search providers do not have any obligation to keep the interfaces used by Searx stable - so service with a search provider may come and go over time. Use automatic updates on FreedomBox to keep your Searx fixes coming in regularly. Use multple engines and change things up when needed.
Without revealing any spoilers I’ll point out that some of the search services availble for Searx are rather, uh, special purpose. It’s part of the fun. There are ten search type categories (General, Files, Images, Science, etc.), each of which has several to many search options. There’s a lot you can customize in here and experimentation is rewarded.
Here are my favorite bits to help you get further along:
- I like the Logicodev Dark style in Preferences
- I like the Open Access DOI resolvers which help you read research papers - I’ve turned over a new leaf using that. Look at the Science engines selections.
- I have weaned myself off of major curated search providers. There are acceptable alternatives.
- If you must do google searches, and don’t want to use Google, use StartPage through Searx
- reddit as a search engine is becoming more popular, and I’ve started to use that.
- Method = POST is better for your privacy than Method = GET. Leave it on the default of POST.
Today my general search engines are:
- etools
- qwant
- yandex
- duden (broken today. Engines cannot retrieve results: duden(HTTP error))
- seznam
- mojeek (most of my results come from this today)
- naver