It’s pretty rare for people to not be logged into a Google service though, especially on mobile.

If that is the case then this conversation is somewhat moot isn’t it? But I also don’t really think it is all that rare for iOS users.

You can get a bunch of people to use it though (friends and family).

That’s a good point, definitely see a benefit then.

I also doubt they build profiles just based on IP, since it’s not uncommon to share IPs given the IPv4 shortage. There’s also CGNAT where hundreds of thousands of people share a sml number of public IPs.

Certainly, and because of that you don’t really need a proxy.

There are definitely some benefits to such a setup, I just don’t think it really is superior to a search provider that is built around not logging and selling your searches. At least not to the degree it gets recommended in these types of posts.

That’s not how cookies work, cookies are stored on, and controlled by, your client. Unless your client is sharing the cookie information across devices, google wouldn’t be able to track you across devices using cookies. Routing all of your searches to one machine allows google to build a richer search profile against you, rather than one scattered across multiple different IPs, device fingerprints, etc.

I assume you mean across the web? That too is more of a different issue, as it is unrelated to the use of google search itself, rather it is due to the existence of tracking services embedded into the websites you visit.

At the end of the day, your VPS is still having a search profile build against it, in a similar manner to just using your personal device. The main difference is that you are paying to have a specialized computer that serves as a single purpose google searching device. Perhaps it is more challenging for them to link that device directly to you specifically, but I’d honestly bet that it is achievable.

I suppose I don’t fully understand the model, but if you host it yourself, then wouldn’t that be significantly worse for privacy because you’re essentially forwarding your searches to multiple search engines instead of one?

Again, maybe I’m missing something, but SearXNG just seems like a bunch of privacy memes mashed together without actually considering the threat model involved very deeply. Ultimately all of your data needs to be forwarded to a search provider in the end, the only way you are gaining any benefit would be if you had a sufficient pool of other users to obfuscate who is querying what, with a host who you are able to trust with your data.

Caveat that it is only privacy preserving if you trust whoever is hosting it.

with the nature of the communication (text, video, image, …) from which a lot can be inferred

If the messages are E2EE, the server wouldn’t have access to this information.