I'm using SearXNG, EXA, Tavily, and soon (tm) Cloudflare

They all give slightly different results, you can dedup / fusion with heuristics / another agent

I have my mine setup with a searxng instance I run in a docker. Works great and costs zero.

Hermes is just an agent that can be setup for whatever you want (coding or more commonly personal assistant ala clawdbot). You can set it up with any of the standard tools and MCPs like brave or tavily for search.

Yes, Brave search is one of these services I highly recommend paying for, the search they provide (similar to Exa, Tavily) is what makes an "OK LLM" become super smart.