That begs the question, is there a self-hosted front end where you specify the backend search engines to use to get results and the frontend displays them for you as a proxy?

@jdaviescoates Correct, if you use Gandi API you are using wildcard certs and good.

When a cert is issued, most of the current certificate providers these days "log" the domain name as part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency project. These reports can then be scanned later. For example, go to https://crt.sh/ and search for say %google.com%. This gives various subdomains of google. When you use wildcard certs, only *.domain.com is logged and thus the subdomain is hidden. So, if you install searx at mysecretsearch.domain.com, there is no way for anyone to know the subdomain mysecretsearch since DNS has no subdomain search.

I think this can be marked as solved...

Since the reinstall back in Feb I've since been using my searx instance as my primary search on both my laptop and mobile, however, it's largely stopped working in recent days

Thanks, new version is published now.