I'm running a search instance on a VPS so my home IP isn't linked to my searches. The main disadvantage is that my VPS is in Toronto and I live 2hrs away so geo searches don't work very well. For instance, if I Google "restaurants" I get results for local restaurants whereas if I Gregle (I named my search engine Gregle) I get results for results near my VPS.

DM me if you want a link to my instance to check it out. It's open but I don't publicize it because bad actors could ruin my IP addresses reputation with spam queries via the API.

I recently learned about it, but haven't used it. From what I understand, it's similar to how the fediverse works; individual instances are run by whoever wants to run them. If you run your own instance, you have complete trust in it, but you effectively aren't anonymous (unless you support a whole bunch of users to pool together. If you join someone else's instance, you have to trust them. There's public and private instances.

The other downside is that, like many other small players, they are a metasearch engine, so they rely on the big players like Google and Bing who actually crawl the web for information to index. If Google or Bing want to hide information, that trickles down into metasearch engines, too. It's somewhat buffered by thr fact that your metasearch can look through a whole bunch of different indexes, so you aren't held to one countries censorship, but it probably still has an effect.

Searx is dead. You'll want to use SearxNG instead.