vh
0f748ea54e
The ana-docker instance was returning zero results for every query while reporting healthy — 4.5 months stale (2026.4.17 against a current 2026.9.3), its engine scrapers rotted against sites that had changed. /healthz proves the web app answers and says nothing about whether search works, so seven days of green sat on top of a search box that found nothing. Moved to nh3-docker rather than updated in place, because the colo egress is the other half of the problem: 38.120.12.42 is a datacenter address that DuckDuckGo and Startpage CAPTCHA, while nh3-docker egresses residentially at 70.230.226.88. Same reasoning as the fleet's residential proxy for yt-dlp, applied at the source instead of around it. Config corrected along the way: base_url said searxng.pfi.local, a name retired on 2026-08-19, while the environment said something else — the env won so nothing broke and the file quietly lied. The karmasearch.videos removal key never matched, because the engine's real name has a space. scripts/searxng-health.sh asserts results > 0 across three unrelated queries. That is the check that would have caught this, and the only kind that can: the mechanism was healthy throughout. services/searxng-mcp exposes it as `web_search` at user scope, so every Claude Code session has it. Zero results raise rather than returning an empty list — an empty list is indistinguishable from a broken aggregator, which is precisely how this hid. Old instance stopped and removed; DNS alias repointed to searxng.nh3.internal.
searxng
Privacy-respecting metasearch. Runs on nh3-docker (10.100.50.40:9996,
searxng.nh3.internal), and is exposed to every Claude Code session on nh3-dev
as the web_search MCP tool.
⚠ Why NH3 and not the colo
Measured 2026-09-03:
ana-docker egress 38.120.12.42 datacenter -> DuckDuckGo/Startpage CAPTCHA
nh3-docker egress 70.230.226.88 residential -> no gate on that account
Search engines gate datacenter ranges. Running the aggregator from the
residential-egress site removes the problem at the source rather than proxying
around it — the same reason the fleet keeps a residential SOCKS5 proxy on
nh3-dev for yt-dlp. If NH3's egress ever changes, outgoing.proxies in
conf/searxng-settings.yml has the fallback commented in place.
⚠ It is not a complete fix: brave, duckduckgo and startpage still
CAPTCHA from here. google cse carries general search at ~20 results/query, and
yandex, wiby, github, stackoverflow and marginalia all work. General
search is therefore effectively single-engine — if google cse breaks, the
instance goes quiet, which is exactly the failure below.
⚠ /healthz cannot tell you whether search works
On 2026-09-03 the old ana-docker instance was found returning zero results for every query, for an unknown number of weeks, while:
- the container reported
healthyfor 7 straight days, 0 restarts; - the Homepage card was green;
/healthzreturned 200 every 30 seconds.
It was running 2026.4.17 while current was 2026.9.3 — 4.5 months of engine
scrapers rotting against sites that had changed their markup. :latest means
"latest at pull time", and nothing re-pulls on its own.
Proven by experiment before touching anything: the new image, same settings file, same host, same query returned 20 results where the running one returned 0.
scripts/searxng-health.sh asserts the property, not the mechanism — three
unrelated queries must each return results > 0. Run it after any change, and
periodically; it is the only thing that catches rot.
Update
ssh infra-ops@nh3-docker 'cd /opt/docker/compose/searxng && \
sudo docker compose pull && sudo docker compose up -d'
scripts/searxng-health.sh
The MCP tool
services/searxng-mcp/ — installed with uv tool install and registered at
user scope (claude mcp add --scope user searxng searxng-mcp), so every
Claude Code session gets web_search with no per-project setup.
⚠ Zero results raise an error rather than returning an empty list. An empty list is indistinguishable from a broken aggregator, and that ambiguity is what let the old instance fail silently for weeks. Same reasoning as althing's "an unreachable post office is an OUTAGE, never an empty inbox".
⚠ Written against mcp 2.x, where FastMCP became MCPServer and the v1
@app.list_tools() decorator API is gone. v1 examples fail at import with
'Server' object has no attribute 'list_tools'.
⚠ uv tool install --force alone served a cached build and silently
reinstalled the old code — the installed file still had the v1 API after the
source no longer did. --reinstall --no-cache was required, and the check that
caught it was md5sum of source vs installed.
Secret
SEARXNG_SECRET lives in /opt/docker/compose/searxng/.env (0600, root) on the
host and is vaulted at nh3-docker/searxng-secret. Never in git.