I tend to use DuckDuckGo most of the time, but its quality has collapsed considerably. Google is terrible now and only worth it for reverse image search. I haven’t tried Brave much and SearX-NG was a pain to set up for being a de-facto Google and Bing wrapper. There’s Kagi but I don’t really have $120/yr for a search engine, nor do I want to deal with how they handle logins and session management.
Why not just use public SearXNG insrances? It’s what I do.
I’d like to set up my own instance at some point, but in the meantime, I get all (or most anyway) of the benefits of Searx without any setup or hassle. You can use just one public instance just fine, but what I like to do is use LibRedirect (that name, I know) to point to about 10 or 15 public instances and it randomly selects from those with each search. When I need it to be real specific, I have a couple public instances where I have saved settings.
If I want to use yandex or startpage, or just want to search say wikipedia, I’ll use bangs, which just means putting a couple exclamation marks before the engine name and my search, like “!!yandex <search string>” or “!!w <search string>” and it automatically searches there directly instead of going through the searxng instance.
By far the best way to search these days, imo. The only issue is that sometimes an instance will get rate limited or the server will go down, but then you just use a different public instance.
Yeah, my own searx-ng insurance with Yandex, DDG, Mojeek and Brave is probably the way to go. I doubt spinup is as hard as I remember.
SearXNG is the way