I’ve been using DuckDuck Go since leaving Google Search, but that seems to be the first step away. I’m not keen on their AI assist. I tried Start Page, but the first four results were ads. I don’t mind paying a small fee for good search. So Brave Search or Kagi?
If you don’t mind paying, Kagi’s the gold standard imo. Been using it for years. The pricing has been pretty garbo at times but they’ve settled on a good model now. Used it extensively for research back when I was a freelance writer and it’s stuck around as my general-use search engine. It’s great for research, functionally really well designed.