I currently really enjoy self-hosted Perplexica (a FOSS alternative to the Perplexity AI search engine), which uses SearXNG as a meta-crawler, and Ollama for local AI integration. I’m very happy with it, but it requires a fairly powerful server (not a Raspberry Pi or another SBC, the only one that might work is the Nvidia Jetson or whatever it’s called, but I haven’t tried that yet).
Mullvad VPN offers Brave Search as a backend in their Leta search engine proxy. That way you don’t have to access Brave directly.