SearXNG is a privacy respecting, open source metasearch engine. It's great, as you can aggregate many search engines into one (google, bing, etc...), and that it's fully self-hostable.
However, the issue is, that the instance provider has full support of what you send as queries to the servers. If you self host it yourself, then the queries still go through one IP address, alas still insecure.
Here's where proton would come in, it's relatively easy to self-host, and would be a great alternative for people moving to a trustable searxng instance, since the main problem with it, is that you have to trust the administrators that they indeed do not log.