Takes some tinkering but I've been liking it. Like so many FOSS projects right now there's some LLM involvement unfortunately, but this dev's been putting out really solid projects even before all this stuff came about.

Definitely works better than SearXNG, plus the customization and the plugin system are excellent. 4play for google searches didnt work well for me, but the Google CSE engine solved that problem.

it's open source and selfhostable (I do so) so I'd say it's good

it's not a search engine, but a proxy, you get your results from multiple sources. i'm currently using it as my main place to search stuff and it works, sometimes there are some quirks (i could improve my config maybe) but it works, i've tried searxng years ago and it was a mess in comparison. keep in mind degoog it's written in js mostly so it's a bit heavy but it has more features and stuff. if you want absolute minimum 4get works very well.

thanks to everyone who replied!!!! I'll keep using degoog 'cause something about is just nice I can't put my finger on it