I've jumped around lots of search engines over the years, and I quite liked running a self-hosted searx. It was a little slow (think 3-4 seconds to load results on average), but you can reduce this by picking the search engines you use carefully (it keeps stats on response time so you can adjust over time).

I'm using Kagi at the moment but searx was a favourite. I had it on a server, but in hindsight I think I would probably put it on my computer itself to reduce the lag and ensure I could always access it without needing it publicly accessible (my main PC is a laptop). Also, make sure you're using SearxNG, the original Searx is no longer maintained.

[–] terraborra@lemmy.nz 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I’ve got a home server that I vpn into for pihole anyway so will just host it on the same machine. In theory I shouldn’t notice too much difference in the way of response time

The main issue is finding the time and energy to get it all set up and running properly.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 1 points 2 weeks ago

When I was using it Searx was a whole pile of tinkering 😆. I think it probably runs just fine without the tinkering, but then you want to stop with all the pinterest results so you try to work out how to filter them out. Then you learn about plugins and so on.

IIRC though, if you're familiar with docker then it was pretty straightforward to spin up an instance.