I don’t know if these are the same but I quite like ddg html. I still don’t fully trust them because ‘murica but I haven’t heard of anything from them yet. I will probably switch to selfhosted librex sometime.
DDG HTML is quite similar to Lite, IIRC Lite does have some JS involved as opposed to HTML version, but I could be wrong.
DDG is Microsoft Bing under the hood, so yeah, not ideal. DDG also made some controversial changes when the Russia/Ukraine war started, but at least for me, I just didn't see any lesser evils in the room that could still get me the results I needed.
I've tried Brave Search and it's impressive what they've done, but their monetization model via Crypto is unlikely to pan out and I don't see them lasting long unless they can find a way to monetize without crypto and ad revenue.
As far as searx is concerned, it just pulls in a bunch of other search engine results and I'm not sure if it just ends up supporting those engines at the end of the day. If anyone else knows more about whether these search platforms are still able to monetize off of searx results, please chime in.
I haven't heard of librex, but will take a look. Thanks for the lead!