I always thought that people using searx etc over duckduckgo were just gluttons for punishment. Having gone an entire morning without search, maybe now is the time to dive down that rabbit hole...
Brave does have an option to use anonymous Google results as a fallback if their index doesn't return enough results, but it will ask you before it does it.
people interested in alternative search tend to be in spaces that aren't your GAFAM big tech networks, we've been on masto since 2018 also
not to come off as overly dismissive of people elsewhere, but you also find that the quality of discourse and people's willingness to think about things are both considerably more elevated
I'm one of those guys. Searx itself is just a meta search engine, using Google and many other search engines. You don't need to dive into any rabbit hole, just use a pre existing server for easy access. From time to time I switch the instance. You can then still decide if you want go the full rabbit hole and host it yourself, but that is not a requirement. At least its fully open source and your data/search queries are not sent to Google or Microsoft. In the settings can be specified which engines you want to use:
Wait, it supports bangs? That's the #1 thing that keeps me specifically with DDG, once i have some time i'll have to explore this (probably not earlier than a couple weeks though)
I was used to the bangs in DuckDuckGo too, but stopped using them. In example I have duckduckgo search engine disabled here, but can still do a ddg only search with !ddg hello . But don't get your hopes too high, because I think it only supports the few bangs and nothing else. It does not support ddg bangs. I registered a DuckDuckGo bang !retro to point to RetroPie forum, but it does not work in Searx.
Edit: It would have been a true banger if we could combine them in Searx like this: !ddg!retro
Alternative you may consider is the brave search. Supports many bangs (?all of what ddg supports). It is independent of other search engines as well. But its picture search is poor.