First of all google went to shit, but duckduckgo has been disappointing me too.
I moved to searx and it was decent but confused me a bit and not always reliable.
But the single biggest problem on the internet for me… The yt search bar. My god I fucking hate it with a passion. It just doesn’t do what its supposed to, its not searching anything at all. Ive literally tried and written every word of the video title plus the channel name and it didnt show up bc I put onen word in the wrong spot.
Its not usable. 90% of the time I’m getting random Indian videos with nothing to do woth my search, shorts (which I blocked in revanced so thats fine now) and people also watch or recommended videos from my user profile.
I switched to Kagi a year ago. It’s free for first hundred searches so you can see what it’s like. If you like it you can pay for it. I know paying for a search Engine is very niche, but I use my search Engine for both work and personal, it’s a tool and frankly you’ve already hit the nail on the the head with everything else just being shit. Between rubbish results and poor privacy, I really am happy that I have Kagi as an option. The price per year ain’t bad for how much I use it and I’m happy my money is going to devs rather that aren’t selling my data