I think there is some postprocessing but yeah it uses Bing. I simply meant that SearXG uses its results (and Bing too for that matter). So it’s layers all the way down.

I’ll add that it’s a meta-search engine rather than something that does the actual searching itself. That’s still useful, but you’re limited by the quality of the upstream search engines (including google, duckduckgo, qwant, etc).

The gain from self-hosting is that you have more control over the results, and can do things like redirect social media sites to privacy friendly alternatives, and create your own bangs (or even add your own custom search engines).

Probably not a massive privacy gain though, although if you host the instance behind a privacy VPN queries won’t be associated with your IP at least.

They don’t seem particularly bright but it seems they’ve done well for themselves in life.

This is such a dangerous combination. Success combined with stupidity seems to breed arrogant people that have never had a deep thought in their entire lives (nor do they believe they need to, given their success). Usually these types defer to some sort of homespun “common sense” no matter the topic at hand.