Root cause of the silent-empty-results failure peedlar-dev reported. Of 55
general-category engines, only seven were enabled-by-default, and six of those
are dictionary, translation, currency or encyclopedia engines that return
nothing for an ordinary web query. `google cse` was the instance's ONLY general
web engine, so a single quota exhaustion produced HTTP 200 with an empty
results array and no error, for every consumer on the fleet.
The distinction that matters: `inactive: false` only makes an engine
selectable, `disabled: false` puts it in the default set. The other 48 were
selectable-but-off, which an API client has no way to change.
Enables five keyless engines, each bang-probed first and returning real results
with no API key: duckduckgo web 10, bing 10, yep 20, yahoo 7, wiby 12. General
web engines go 1 -> 6. Deliberately excluded: mojeek, qwant, startpage and the
brave scraper, all of which CAPTCHA or rate-limit this egress, and seznam,
which times out.
Verified under the live failure condition rather than a simulated one. google
cse is still quota-suspended right now, and three consecutive queries returned
38-41 results from 4-5 engines each. The single point of failure is gone while
the failing engine is still failing.
Also adopts the concurrent v4 settings work from the other session — marginalia
on its public key, and the captcha'd-scraper removals — plus the fix for the
crash-loop that work introduced: this build has no !ENV YAML constructor, so
`api_key: !ENV SEARXNG_BRAVE_API_KEY` made the file unparseable and the
container restarted ten times with search down fleet-wide. That block stays
commented; the vaulted Brave key is valid but has no supported path into the
settings file, which is a separate decision.
vh
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