Back in April 2021, after a lot of organizational issues regarding the code-review process within the SearX project. Alex (dalf) and I forked the project to create SearXNG. We got Markus (return42), who also wanted to join along for the ride, he was also an active SearX contributor.
The gain of popularity of the project was slow but steady, we positioned ourselves by saying we are a more actively maintained version of SearX because we fixed the engines faster than SearX (core feature of SearX(NG)). We even got ourselves a section in SearX readme about a controversial difference between SearX and SearXNG.
I won't lie, being a maintainer of both project, has