Can you explain what's so good about it compared to Google besides the privacy aspect? I hear it's "better" a lot.

+1 for Kagi. I finally decided to drop Google after their bullshit WEI proposal with Chrome recently and it has been great so far. Yes, Kagi is paid, but we all know the saying that "if you're not paying for it, you are the product." That's not the case with Kagi.

Curious, do they accept crypto as payment?

Qwant just shows Bing results, like most alternative search engines.

Man that website was so useful, thank you for linking it

Their browser is sharing data with MS, since they're using their services instead of Google. They've been upfront about it and explained there is no way around it.

As long as you just use their search engine, you're fine.

In addition to the Microsoft trackers, I referenced this as well in another reply in this topic:

https://reclaimthenet.org/duckduckgo-down-ranking-russian-disinformation

There are plenty of other sources that also reported on this.

TIL about farside, it looks very useful

How can I set this up on cromite?

I've added farside.link searx instance "main link" (https://farside.link/searx) to "homepage" but it gives me the same searx instance everytime

OP said they want to stop using SearxNG.

Also, selfhosting it makesist less privacy friendly, if you are hosting it only for yourself, as the search engines your instance is contacting can easily determine that all those searches are coming from a same IP. Sp, even if it is preventing the telemetry collection, a detailed profile can be made on the person hosting it. Butiff multiple people are using it, profiling becomes difficult. Same is the case with using self-hosted VPNs. They are good against censorship and for some other things, but not for privacy.