I’ve always been tempted to set up SearXNG, but all the search engines already make me do captchas and anti-bot checkboxes every few searches. Wouldn’t a meta search engine run into the same issues? Or if I had a local server scraping search results pages wouldn’t I instantly get banned from all the major searches? I guess I already feel pseudo-banned from them so maybe it’s not actually a problem. Just a few minutes…
I would say also -- if search engines are making you do CAPTCHAs every few searches, this is probably an issue with your exit node. I notice a sizable increase in CAPTCHA barriers when I'm on my VPN (most annoyingly Google/YouTube, which sometimes will serve you an infinite number of CAPTCHAs w/o letting you through).
By contrast, my SearXNG instance is making ~100 searches a day from a known good IP address (being my VPS), so rate limiting is less of a problem. You can also set up API keys for many search engines.