I do not have the time to address these questions with every user on every forum so I have written this to give an answer once and for all about what the latest changes were and what they mean for NHSEO.
When you updated you will have been greeted with a message that stated "proxies for searching are now very important and will need to be used" and "the next stage will include a built in proxy harvesting system". Yes proxies are currently needed and, yes, a proxy harvester will be added.
Sadly with the change to the new searching system came a bunch of bugs and issues that had to be ironed out before I could even contemplate adding more functionality (proxy harvester) however these bugs are now long gone and the proxy harvester is in its testing phase. I am confident that the proxy harvester will be fully implemented and released later today or, more likely, early tomorrow.
What was this change all about?
Versions of No Hands SEO prior to v1.6.19 would use the Bing API to find relevant target blogs for your links and while this was fine at first it started to return fewer and fewer relevant results meaning less targets and less relevancy. To combat this drop in quality the decision was made to switch to searching Yahoo directly due to its relatively loose search restrictions and high number of relevant results returned.
Why does this change require proxies?
When searching search engines they will only allow X amount of search queries in a given time period, to get around this you need proxies to hide your identity and there is no getting around this.
Is a Proxy Harvester being added?
Yes
When will the Proxy Harvester be added?
It will be released when it is fully tested and working. I am expecting this to be today (5th feb) or tomorrow (6th Feb).
I hope that clears up a few of the more common questions I know people have.