I use self-hosted SearXNG as part of my low-budget, privacy-oriented home AI stack with Open WebUI. It's a pretty useful tool!
I'm a bit hesitant to post this because I'm not really here for self-promotion, but at some point I did have an LLM help me write up a guide on how I implemented it. It's here if anyone is curious: https://optimoss.ai/resources/searxng.html
Still a happy Kagi user. Paying for search aligns the incentives cleanly IMHO
I wish they'd make it easier to adjust individual engine's weight, ideally right from the UI instead of a config file. Personally, after bumping up Google/Wiby and bumping down DDG/Presearch/Startpage (and disabling Bing altogether), results became much better. It still displays some results that only the latter engines turn up, but IMO there's noticeably less cruft.
I like Brave search a lot. I don’t use the Brave browser though.
SearXNG or serious, pick one.
Or catch them all and fuse the results. I'm hitting Exa, Tavily, and self hosted SearXNG, then fusing the results with heuristics or an agent