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.
Assuming you do have a place to host it (even at home on your PC, or an old PC, not necessarily reachable from the internet), and assuming you know a bit about docker, it’s quite easy actually.
Where it all started for me: https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker
Note that the example above in the beginner variant uses Caddy as a webserver which - by default - assumes you’re running it on a server that can be publicly reached from the internet and won’t start up correctly otherwise - e.g. at home - unless you change some config.