Vexz

I think you can even port forward with the free plan of ProtonVPN.

The problem is that it doesn't matter which instance I use. I tried multiple instances, even self-hosted one myself. Sooner or later I always had the problem with timeouts (even with my self-hosted local instance) and it's so damn annoying. Even refreshing the page doesn't always help. I really don't feel like hopping from instance to instance just because my preferred instance has timeouts again. Reliability is crucial to me.

You can find many public hosted instances here but some of them use Cloudflare because they fear DDoS attacks. So keep that in mind when choosing your instance. Best is to host your own instance.

Some thoughts from a long term SearXNG user: While I really appreciate how privacy respecting SearXNG is I had a lot of trouble with it. Often enough you get 0 results because of timeouts with the search engines it uses and sometimes the order of the presented search results isn't good. Sometimes the thing I've been searching for was the 10th result while in other search engines it was the first result. So the prioritizing of the results is often enough just odd.

We live in a time where there are so many search engines but all of them have their flaws. It's really frustrating. :(

That's weird, I never had memory leak problems.

I don't like Whoogle because of their UI for image searches. Imo it's really bad but that's just my opinion. The image search is also the reason why I don't use Brave Search because it redirects you to Google or Bing. What's the point in being "a privacy respecting search engine" when you get redirected to Google and Bing which are the worst search engines in terms of privacy?

Been using a self hosted instance of SearXNG but recently went away from SearXNG in gerneral. Why? Search results more than often enough ended in timeouts from the search engines. It was frustrating and they never fixed it. In terms of privacy it's top notch though.

Starpage was bought by an advertising company.

I'm not familiar with bangs (things like the !g you mentioned) but if you get redirected to Google doesn't that kill your privacy because you use Google instead of DDG? Or am I just misunderstanding the whole concept of bangs?

Hehe, nice. Luckily I have my own NAS with WebDAV which I use to transfer/access files anywhere. And MiXplorer supports WebDAV, so that's a win. :)

Edit: This might be an option too to share files with this app.

I downloaded MiXplorer today. It's really great. Thanks for the tip!

Interesting. Never heard of Beeper. Looks like they even have a client for desktops. Does it also cover (video) calls and screen sharing for Discord and/or Signal?

I can confirm that.