I host my own searx instance and can totally recommend it. I have it set as the default engine on all my devices and I don't miss google at all.

Not sure why you'd go to the trouble of avoiding google and just give all your data away to ddg? Anyone other than yourself is liable to become/be acquired by some shady entity

Qwant also uses Bing as a backend, and so their results are usually very similar to DDG. Searx is metasearch so it depends a lot on the particular instance you use.

If anyone is interested in exploring alternative search indices, try Yippy, Mojeek, or private.sh (a proxy to Gigablast run by PIA). Yippy is actually pretty OK. The other two are somewhat marginal but will occasionally pop up an interesting result you'd never see on another engine.

I have been using Qwant almost exclusively for the last year. I am very pleased with the results and my (increasingly) infrequent comparisons with Google on the same string increase my confidence that it provides good results for my needs.

Mojeek is independent search engine with their own index: https://mojeek.com/

Also: cliqz.com that is surprisingly good for technical queries, and quite good for general searches

See also: https://yacy.net.