I experienced the same problem and the workaround was to select English from the Default Language dropdown menu (after performing a search). I switched to another instance anyway.

Been using searx.be for a bit now and they had many results in Dutch and German, which can be expected for a site based in Belgium.

Belgium is in the domain name. You can check where the server is located :

https://searx.space

Austria AT NETCUP-AS netcup GmbH, D

Though I’m using Tor with searx.be searching I do get results in Russian since a few days. Usually it is either Swedish or Dutch. Never German. I can imagine the searx.be maintainer is rotating IP addresses at the part which does the talking with Google and other search engines to prevent quick blocking of the instance. yewtu.be (same maintainer) does use proxies (that is visible when blocking auto-play of videos).

Huh, and for me Searx hasn’t been great for searching in Russian in particular.

According to their page it’s a pure searxng instance. I didn’t see anything on my own instance changing so there are three options I see:

• The mentioned server side changes (e.g. A server move you mentioned but could also be server settings, provider settings, etc).
• client side changes: somehow your Firefox provides different information to alter the results
• subjective change: it’s always a possibility that either what you searched or your perception was more fine tuned to Cyrillic.

And then there’s the obligatory “none or all of the above”.

Personally I’d guess it’s just a fluke. I gave it a few searches from Firefox mobile on “all languages” and had a mix of mainly English and a bit of German und French in there as results.

Edit: if you’re comfortable with that feel free to share some search terms and we can compare results. Would be curious myself!