I got a private instance going a few months ago and I really like it. It's just a little slow cause it runs on a Pi (my only 24/7 device at the moment). The hostname rewrite feature is cool and I'll have to check out the archive cache feature.

I also use a public instance at work and it's way more effective than the bloated corporate search engines. Super handy for engine or language specific searches too.

I really tried to love it. I tweaked a lot of settings but i never quite got the results i wanted. I still have a selfhosted instance running for occasional use. But i mainly use DuckDuckGo now.

I use SearXNG since half a year or so I think. It can be a little bit slow at times and some source engines will be deactivated temporarily. But overall its good enough for my daily use. I don't search the web too often anyway and often use the search on the services webpage directly (Steam, Wikipedia or other stuff in example). One can default to SearXNG and in some cases use DuckDuckGo or Startpage (instead Google) for alternative results.

However sometimes an instance is offline temporarily or forever (but never tested after forever, so not sure about that). In those cases I have to switch to a different instance in Firefox default search engine, which I have bookmarked a few to choose from. So be prepared.

Spun up the container about a week ago. Made it my default search in Firefox. So far I've been happy with the quality of the results although I will admit there is a perceptible lag when submitting searches, compared to google/bing/etc.... I imagine that's mostly to do with the fact that it's waiting on multiple search engines to fill my request.

I do like it so far. I figure with some tuning I could get the response time down.