Some excellent advice, this is a really great post!

Personally I’ve opted to stick with DDG for now, its some what centred around privacy, whilst thats probably not much when it comes to tracking I at least appreciate the illusion. Search works good enough about 90% of the time and it allows you to easily switch off the AI BS so you can search the web like a normal search engine.

I’ve used others like Ecosia which I thought was not terrible but not great either. I used searchxng for a while and the results were always much more interesting but I would find it to be a bit more unreliable. I also tried Gibiru which I found to be one of the better privacy central search engines, it was fairly reliable but also had a good balance of unique results too.

Kagi, I tried this out but there is something about this search engine which I just don’t like. I get the whole idea of paying for it because they don’t sell your data but something about it just feels shady and a bit like a cash grab on people who are eager for a privacy focused situation but don’t want to think about it too hard.