There’s an open issue about this on github. It’s the remote API is only recognising the first word of your query.

This has been bugging me too.

The timeouts are because the engines are presenting captchas. There’s a work around whereby you use your instance as a proxy, navigate to that remote engine, and do the captcha.

These two issues are a real pain in the ass so while I do presently have a searxng instance I’ve been using qwant the last few weeks because I’m just over it.