I think that may be a bit of an unfair statement. They do note just above in the public instances the following:
> Note: Use public instances at your own discretion. Maintainers of Whoogle do not personally validate the integrity of these instances, and popular public instances are more likely to be rate-limited or blocked.
Having tested with various search strings, the time to first search-result paint for the the first public instance [1] feels just as fast a Google.
No. My self-hosted instance is about as fast as using Google directly. Maybe a half a second slower, but barely noticeable if it is. I can't even tell.
Is this to be expected with self-hosted too?
[1] https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search#public-instances