Comment by seanw444

Well all Searx does is act as a single-request-in, multiple-requests-out proxy. Whatever you search on it, you search on those same sites, just from the IP address of the Searx instance. They will assume your Searx instance is a person, and build a profile of its searches. Eventually, if you're the only one using it, and someone is able to link your search history on your Searx instance to your history on that same engine from before you used Searx, they have an uninterrupted search history / profile built on you.

Building a profile of one person using queries from multiple people is difficult, and it gives you plausible deniability if it's ever brought against you in some accusation.

So I guess I'm not entirely sure what you mean by clear state. If you mean clear state on the instance side of things, the point is that it doesn't really keep any state unless you want it to. The problem is the state that is stored on the search engine side of things.

The more people in your instance of choice, the more anonymous you become. But since you're not the one running the public instances, you don't have the power to tweak all the settings you may want to. There are plenty of public instances that have great defaults though, but you're ultimately trusting that instance owner to not log your queries as well. So make sure it's a trustworthy-enough instance. Or use multiple instances, as a counter to that.

Ultimately, even the worst-configured public Searx instance I've used in the past, was much better than using any mainstream search engine directly. The most important settings are which engines you want to pull results from. Most public instances don't let you set all of those, if I remember correctly. So being able to choose those may or may not be important to you. Again, some public instances have pretty good search engine settings.