SearXNG

Self-hosting is where SearXNG truly pays off, because then no third party, not even a friendly instance operator, sees your queries; it aggregates results from many engines under your own roof. The catch is right there: running it takes effort, and the public instances, while convenient, mean trusting whoever runs them and can get rate-limited or blocked by upstream engines. Pick it if you’re technical enough to host your own and want metasearch with no middleman. Everyone else should treat public instances as a decent-but-not-ideal shortcut.