So Just To Explain It, Searx Is Not A Search Engine Itself— It's A Frontend For A Group Of Search Engines,

so just to explain it, searx is not a search engine itself— it's a frontend for a group of search engines, so it's still searching with wikipedia, google, duckduckgo, bing, ecosia, etc. it's really easy to choose the group of engines or sites you want to use in the settings, plus you're avoiding a lot of data tracking, ads, and there is no AI on top.

there's no company behind it, it's self-hosted so you're either running your own instance or using someone else's. i do recommend eventually running your own, because the more users on one instance means higher traffic which may cause it to eventually get blocked by google and stuff.

searx.space has list of running publicly available instances, some of them are already fine-tuned for academic purposes and there are currently 76 at the time i'm posting this!

wikipedia no longer being anywhere near the top of search results when looking up anything feels eviscerating