I’ve gotten very into self-hosting (on device, not on a server) my own search engine, but searxng is unbearably clunky to make run on my Gentoo OpenRC machine. Two projects stuck out, 4get and omnisearch, but which of these do you think is the best and do you know other ones?
None of those - searxng, deGoog, 4get - are private search engines. The are metacrawlers / indexers for things like Google, brave, DuckDuckGo, etc etc.
The difference is not subtle.
They anonymise your request to the underlying index, but the index they’re querying is still Google/Brave/DDG etc…so you can still be fingerprinted over time.
If you want a private search engine, the only one that comes to mind in YaCy (which is peer2peer).
If you don’t want to self host or p2p, your options are Mojeek (own crawler, index, no tracking), Marginalia (ditto but very niche) and maybe Kagi (which is sort of hybrid).