Would recommend to just try their 100 free searches. Their results are good, but it’s hard to have an objective measure. For me, it’s the little features that make it worth it (and that they have a forum for feature requests, and a proper changelog).

Yes, it's great. I use it for about two years already and never had any problem. I went to search for something on Google like twice during that time.

I've been disappointed with pretty much all recent SEs (DDG being among the very worst). Having been an early Scroogle user, ixquick (startpage) and a few other ones I dearly miss, I've been using https://freespoke.com/ lately and find it tolerable.

I was using searx instances with reasonable results but many of them started failing recently.

Anyway, I hope everyone finds a good one. I fear things will only get worse though.