Been using SearXNG for about a year now, and I just can’t deal with instances constantly getting blocked by search engines anymore. So I’d like to find something a bit more reliable. I’ve read that DuckDuckGo has had some controversies in the past, and I wouldn’t touch Brave with a 39 and a half foot pole.
I selfhost SearXNG and route it’s traffic through a VPN. I rarely get blocked by search engines, and when I do I just change the VPN server. You lose the benefit of your data being intermixed with everyone elses on a shared instance, but you still get the other privacy improvements from SearXNG