DuckDuckGo is very good and they have been steady in terms of their results and growth for years. Kagi is nice too (I know the team as a disclaimer but their effort is a good one). You.com and Neeva, as well as others are getting in there too.
I founded a distributed search engine Wowd.com more than 10 years ago but we were a decade too early, not that it really matters now.
In terms of shameless plugs I also suggest YottaAnswers (I am a founder) which is a smart AI system capable of returning billions of direct answers. Direct answering is key as the open Web with high quality organic links is long gone and search results with blue links and keyword matching are now a legacy technology.
A key question is then how many direct answers (in infoboxes, bolded) Google is currently capable of. I think the answer is surprisingly small, around 15-20B in my professional opinion. That is not a small number per se, but is so compared to Google's enormous resources ($135B+ cash, 1M+ servers, 16K+ PhDs, 60T+ webpages, 10T+ user clicks ...) Of course I invite all parties to shed more light my estimate above as Google keeps it a closely guarded secret.
Voltaire famously said more than two centuries ago that all fiat currencies inevitably tend to their intrinsic value, which is zero. I propose a modified variant for ads, that also tend to the same intrinsic value eventually.
1. lately been using Baidu + Bing + Google + Yandex if run into something particularly tough to find, e.g., reverse image search. EntireWeb can also be helpful
2. tend not to use DDG, Neeva, Qwant, StartPage, You, etc. or most other traditional alt engines since most are Bing based, a couple are Google based
3. am tracking Brave, though don't use much, as they are scraping some direct
4. neera.ai (not Neeva as already cited) has interesting UI- basically unrolls DDG's bangs & mojeek can also be helpful -- haven't had chance to suss out if they direct scrape or bing under hood, etc.
5. Contextual Web, Exalead, Gigablast, Yacy, etc. are mixed bag in my experience -- sometimes get lucky, tend to not have coverage for everyday use, more when going exhaustive search on something
6. honorable mention to web.archive.org which has saved the day for me many times
7. honorable mention to Breeze, which is topic search engine founded / building, re: https://breezethat.com/ -- mix of Bing, Google, and we direct scrape
In the search results we offer buttons to look elsewhere, you can customise which search engines those buttons are.
These smaller engines obviously have less coverage, partly due to cost, partly due to being blocked on larger websites who whitelist their preferred UAs. It's good that there's the likes of DDG and Ecosia but ultimately they're feeding off Bing's index.
All I'd say is if people are interested in alternatives, try a search or two on the alternatives. The search engine market is huge and providing breathing space for the alternatives means people giving them a chance.
I tried Kagi for a while but I found it harder to skim the results quickly (I can't explain why though) and ended up going back to DDG. Will keep an eye on it though as it seems promising.
Switched from Google a few years ago and very rarely had to !g to get what I wanted. DDG used to struggle with local results but that's vastly improved in the last year or so.
I switched to Kagi because Neeva was recommending me InfoWars content. Why can't anyone just make a search engine? Why do algorithmic recommendations have to pollute everything?
Anyway, Kagi is good so far but I haven't tested it enough to say how results compare.
They have checked checkbox newsletter by default. Moreover, why they need a name for registration?
Privacy my ***…
Andy search: https://andisearch.com/
Brave is interesting; and so are Mojeek (UK) and Kagi.
So there is also Bing, You, Recalll, Marginalia.