searxng had been answering from google cse alone for at least a day, with
brave and startpage suspended and duckduckgo returning CAPTCHA. Updating the
image from 2026.9.3+a1144dda3 to 2026.9.18+c0042add3 restored all four
engines immediately, and they held across 11 consecutive queries run after the
change specifically to rule out a freshly-reset circuit breaker flattering the
first measurement.
before searxng/searxng@sha256:3602e6ddbeba037f5d800d1ed9d296a8b93c9f5b3cf9d05fa179d0e766dd59a1
after searxng/searxng@sha256:e0027a772aeeea55bf642256aae6fb3344ffa5f25ca665898c2ea821101334c4
The image stays on :latest rather than being digest-pinned. For this stack that
is deliberate and now demonstrated: upstream ships engine-handler fixes as
providers change their bot gating, so being current is the mitigation, and a
pin would have frozen the breakage in place. The post office is pinned for the
opposite reason — it is the fleet message bus and must not move under us.
README corrected. It had carried two successive wrong diagnoses, both blaming
egress, and now records the real cause plus the two measurements that
falsified them: reverting to direct NH3 egress reproduced the failure exactly,
and a live !ddg probe on a freshly restarted container also CAPTCHA'd, ruling
out a stale suspension timer. Both wrong claims asserted causation from
correlation without a baseline.
The health-script blind spot is unchanged and still called out:
scripts/searxng-health.sh reports the same passing result whether four engines
answer or one.
vh
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