

simply don’t have time
Sorry, but that is no reason. That’s a bit akin to having a dog and saying: “Nah I don’t have time to walk the dog now”. Selfhosting something that is publicly available (not as in “everyone can use it” but “everyone can access it”) bears some level of responsibility. You either make the time to properly set up and maintain it, or you shouldn’t selfhost stuff.


IP in itself might not be as much of a problem, unless you have a static IP, which most consumers don’t. And even if you do, you are also hiding a lot of baggage relating to user agents or other fingerprintable settings. IP alone is rarely used as a sole point to link your traffic to other datapoints. On top of that, you can still just decide to exclude google, bing etc from your search results and rely more “open” ones like DDG or ecosia.
Another huge upside of searxng is the aggregation of results. The search results of google are all up to, well, google. Same with bing, which is controlled by microsoft. If these companies now decide to “surpress” certain information, people using only those engines directly would no longer see those news. However, if you get your results from multiple search engines, you are not - or lets say less - affected by that kind of nonsense.
As always with news and information, the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle. And that’s where searxng helps out tremendously.