per the searxng container instructions:

’’’ Understanding container architecture basics is essential for properly maintaining your SearXNG instance. This guide assumes familiarity with container concepts and provides deployment steps at a high level. ’’’ The fact that you’re logging into your container to manually edit your config hints that you need to read more about managing containers.

Make sure you’re editing the file that you’re mounting on the host, and edit it from the host.

Have you checked the actual log with podman logs? It’ll tell you what it’s doing about its config.