Probably a big part of it is the internet emerged from the USA and Silicon Valley already was a strong tech hub in the 90s when it really started becoming worldwide. Back in the 80s and into the early 90s UK used to also to have a pretty big concentration of talent but for some reason that started going away as the 90s progressed.

well searx is just metasearch so you still depend on whatever you’re getting the results from.

My understanding is that this is basically just presenting Google results. Certainly better for privacy but doesn’t do much for tech sovereignty.

I’ve been using it for a couple of months and while I agree the results can sometimes be interesting to compare I think it seems more primitive and result quality worse to the point that I have to go to other searches relatively often. It isn’t as smart about my native language and is only able to search for the exact word typed instead of different variants of it for example.