I self-host a SearXNG instance that is public facing. On a VPS. I share it with friends and family, and I do not mind if some strangers use it as well.

What I’m afraid of is getting my IP rate limited or even blacklisted by search engines. I would like to keep the instance public facing for UX reasons (no VPN, no SSO).

I enabled SearXNG internal limiter, which I’m not sure what it does.

Additionally, I am rate limiting at the reverse proxy level (Caddy) as follows:

rate_limit {remote.host} 10r/s
rate_limit {path.*} 50r/s

That is, 10 requests per second for a single IP address, and 50 requests per second in general.

Would you have improvements to suggest  me, or further measures I could take?

Edit: I’m not using Cloudflare or any similar solution and I want to avoid it.