Gotta admit... I'm sold on Kagi.

The experience and quality has been fantastic using their free tier (100 free searches a month), enough that I decided to pay for it to keep using it.

Gist: it's a search engine that chose to rely on subscriptions instead of ads and data mining... and it shows in the quality of the search results. There isn't a whole page of them linking to other partner or owned services before you get any results. On top of that there's a crapload of customization and control of your experience (such as choosing what things it tries to automatically answer).

As mentioned, there's a free tier of 100 searches a month, that's actually good for most people to use for a week or two. No sensitive data needed, so I recommend giving it a try.

https://kagi.com/