i was looking at lemmy posts and found a post about alternatives to searxng, and one person commented degoog
i tried it and honestly it seems pretty good, but im not sure how privacy-friendly it is, so im just making sure that its privacy friendly enough (i use DDG for reference)
Depending on the VPN location I use, Degoog landed me in quite a few Honeypots displayed as Gandalf in ascii. Eventually I gave up trying to use the public instances with a VPN and had to fall back to another search engine.