The problem is that there is really no great alternative to Googles search. Most of the other ones use Bing in the backend, which ends up being Microsoft. If anybody knows of a good search engine, which works well and is none commercial that would be great.
There's nothing quite perfect, so I still use ddg the most often. They do pull in most of their results from bing, but they also have their own crawler and use a bunch of other search engines as sources. At least they only send the search query to microsoft, so it's better for privacy than searching directly on google or bing.
SearXNG is an open source meta search engine that compiles results from other search engines.
Marginalia and Clew are a couple of open source search engines that focus on only indexing smaller, independent, or non-commercial sites.
A lot of sites have their own search engines built in, so I'll often search directly on sites like Wikipedia or Lemmy.
There's a good overview of various search engines in this blog post.
Been using Kagi for about almost a year now. It is a paid search engine. Which might sound weird but if you are doing research or any job that relies on access to information, I'd say it's worth the investment.
