Yeah I didn't realize my settings weren't configured right, so I did so, came back today and found they were switched back! That's why I was struggling. I have SearxNG in my whitelist for cookies too, so no idea why that's happening. With the settings changed, it works great!

Mojeek has improved a lot in last times. Is a good alternative, but always good to use several search engines for different tasks, all they have its + and -, eg Startpage is good for image search, Andi is fine for semantic and concept searches with excelent summaries, Mojeek and Qwant for general websearch, etc.- In the Vivaldi forum you can find the, maybe, most complete list of search engines out there which you can test (all include the needed insert code to add these direct to the list in your browser - 19 page thread)

search results: they used to suck when i tried using qwant a year ago, but now theyre the exact same as on ecosia and google from my experience

privacy: this is what they say on their website

AI: havent spotted any ai featurea yet