What I linked to is a listing of public Searx instances. You can look at the list and see things like uptime, where they are hosted, etc.

For performance I find it much better than DDG. In the settings page you can choose which search engines you wish to use, for example Brave, Stract, and Qwant. You can also tailor results by adding things like Lemmy, F-Droid, and Anna's Archive.