I tried searx kuz it looks great, but because it scrapes from google and I use a vpn I kept getting those stupid endless robot checks so ultimately I had to end up going with duckduckgo. Can you point me to more information about how to host it locally or get around the google silliness?

you may need a small virtual machine with python (debian minimal will do the job)
then :

Installation

clone source: git clone https://github.com/asciimoo/searx.git && cd searx
install dependencies: ./manage.sh update_packages
edit your settings.yml (set your secret_key!)
run python searx/webapp.py to start the application

For all the details, follow this step by step installation.

source code viewable : https://github.com/asciimoo/searx#installation

requirments :
certifi==2017.11.5
flask==1.0.2
flask-babel==0.11.2
lxml==4.2.3
idna==2.7
pygments==2.1.3
pyopenssl==18.0.0
python-dateutil==2.7.3
pyyaml==3.13
requests[socks]==2.19.1

There an alternative to google, it's french but seems more valuable with time : Qwant

Didn't knew about searx, seems to be great that could be hosted locally (then shared for friends too !)