I don’t think I can set a cookie on another website. The way I do it at the moment is by passing the settings as a query param alongside the search query. So the favorite settings must already be passed to each instances. Is that not the case for you?

Yes, it’s an alternative, so the end goal is the same. But there are some differences:

• Settings: In Searloc, you can set the language, theme, etc., and those settings are passed to the SearXNG instance.
• Bangs: Bangs are handled locally (directly by the Searloc JS in your browser), whereas Neocities forwards your bangs to an instance.
• Automatic instance updates: It seems that the Neocities instances haven’t changed since 2024. Searloc builds its pool daily from searx.space. From what I can see in the Neocities source, they only use 12 instances in their pool, which isn’t enough in my opinion.
• Retry: A real pain point for me is that sometimes, even with the quality check I’ve added to select the instance pool, an instance doesn’t return the results I’m expecting. So I implemented a retry feature (it’s opt-in—you need to enable it in the settings). If the results aren’t good enough, just type !! and it will rerun the search on another random instance.