been using kagi for some weeks and so far I am satisfied. It has a subscription cost after 300 searches though. But I guess getting rid of advertisements and tracking has a price

Kagi is really good

You need to pay for it but the free search allowance is enough for me.

Marginalia Search perhabs.

Also these are worth mentioning:

• Mojeek have their own index. The results are occasionally a bit of a mess, but they are very open to input and have an account on Mastodon.
• Infotiger have their own index and the results are good.
• Alexandria which use the Common Crawl index.

Use a SearXNG instance for free search. Kagi for paid. We've unfortunately hit the point where this is necessary.

I love duck duck go but theres one key thing I've been missing (or don't know how to do) with google you can just throw -word or -"a phrase" and it will ommit any result with them

I'm running searxng on docker locally, and set that as my search engine on Firefox. It's been awesome! I will probably start a blog and post instructions... Adding the custom search engine into about:config was kinda difficult. Other web browsers should be easier.. (e.g. Vivaldi)

There was a time before google's search engine, when all the previous attempts had not managed to become the dominant entry point for the web. During that time, we would find interesting web pages through people and/or specific interests. Then, google came, and for a time it was good (read like The Second Renaissance Part I story from animatrix). Ads and SEO were not everywhere yet, content mattered more than those two. So, while I came here to suggest what @bbbhltz@beehaw.org commented, when I read your post text I thought that maybe, at least for what we tend to constantly look for news, articles and discussions, we shouldn't constantly rely on search engines. For example, most technologies have news letters, weekly/monthly magazines, mailing lists, community boards or other forms of group communication through which you can gradually discover better content sources (individuals or groups) on what interests you. Without the search engine service and its cost (direct or indirect) between you and the content.

The map https://www.searchenginemap.com/

You'll see a bunch of them are metasearch engines, and not crawlers

Mojeek, Kagi and variations of SearXNG are good bets. Kagi will allow curation. Mojeek lets you make "Focus" filters. Worth trying out.

Kagi has been working out pretty ok for me. Quality of searches is good. No ads, no promoted listings; it is fee based.

If you're a programmer, might I suggest the brave new world of ChatGPT enhanced search via Phind.com

Even if you're not, it's fantastic. It basically takes your input and processes it like ChatGPT but then is trained to run web searches to grab further information and uses that to progress its own internal monologue. The result is a natural language response with search engine like results down the side which are cited within the main response.

Qwant

Try it. It has pretty good results even outside the US and is much more private.

There's no such good search engine. I do all my using bangs (duckduckgo terminolgy) or whatever its called on brave and others but maily brave.The reason I use brave is that because they dont pull results from google and bing.

Have you tried https://duckduckgo.com/ . I've used them a very long time. I do not use Google search.

I've been using qwant for a while now and I think it's nice

https://fairsuch.net

Maybe try stract, try out the different optics it has. My favorite is the discussions optic. Lots of lemmy/kbin results with that. Hacker news optic might be closer to what you're looking for.

One of the problems I have with search engines when looking for tech solutions is that the results are incredibly out of date. I don't bother any more and just go straight to the product's own support forum. Where possible I add the forum's own search entry to Firefox's search box. At least I no longer get answers to a problem no one has had since 2018.