Here's my experience with some search engines:

A Tier -- Gives me the closest results.

• Google: A classic and oftentimes, it gets what I want. A lot of the links are redirects which is annoying.
• Kagi: It's paid but it has a lot of features like "lenses" and "quick answer". The results are pretty good. It gives me good articles and PDFs instead of a blogspot post.
• You.com: The WORST UI EVER but the results are surprisingly decent. It's pretty close to Kagi. It might actually be the same thing. It also has an AI chatbot but I don't think it's as good as Bing's or OpenAI's.

B Tier -- Gives me decent results.

• Startpage: ~~It used to use Google search results but they switched to Bing. It is worse than Google.~~ EDIT: Search results are still closer to Google but they "incorporate Microsoft Bing results". From my experience, it filters out some of Google results that were very useful for me. Their widgets (particularly the Wikipedia one) sometimes displays irrelavant information.
• DuckDuckGo: Results are worse than Google. One time a referral link came up in one of my searches.
• Bing: There's no dark mode. The AI chat tool is pretty nice and is comparable to the OpenAI one (significantly better than Google's Bard). Search results are worse than Google.
• Yandex: Search results are similar to DuckDuckGo.
• Ecosia: Search results are similar to the ones above.

C Tier -- Gives me poor results.

• Brave: Search results feel so inconsistent and out of place. Maybe worse than the ones above.
• Mojeek: Independent search engine. Results aren't very good.

Open Source Front Ends - Results quality varies.

• SearXNG: It depends on which instance you're using. Sometimes search results error out due to rate limiting but you still get results anyway. It has a lot of options and configs so it fits to your liking so you can choose which search engines you want to include.
• LibreX: Actually one of my favorites since I've never encountered errors due to rate limiting but using it to search for images is terribly slow. It has a cool feature where you can add front ends like Libreddit and Wikiless. It also has a built-in torrent search engine.
• Whoogle: The UI isn't very good and it performs poorly on most public instances. A smaller or private instance might be worth looking into. It uses Google search results.

F Tier -- It sucks.

• Qwant: Not available in my country.

If anyone knows of any other search engine not in this list, let me know so I can try it out.

I don't know what is the best but the clearest thing to me is that each day Google is getting worse...

Use a decentralized SearXNG instance and have it query every search engine that exists on the internet, or host your own of you're really actually worried about privacy, and never look back.

For my job and work. I use Kagi. Its not free, but the search returns are very good, you can filter domains out from your returns, it supports custom "bangs" ala duck duck go and theres no tracking of queries. There are also specific filters for things like programming, or recipes for cooking etc. Theres also no ads, you are paying and are the customer. They are trying to establish a sustainable model to run on that allows for privacy.

I find it quite refreshing. It isnt free and I generally hate subscription stuff, but this is easily one I dont mind as it pays dividends often when searching for work.

https://kagi.com/

I've been using https://www.ecosia.org/ because they plow some of their profits into planting trees. They use bing results and I generally find what I need quickly.

Don't even care about SEO fuckery, if the damn things would respect my search queries.

Quotes, operands & other modifiers seem to have been straight up jettisoned.

More and more I have been using the Bing “chat” search. It does a search, filters through the results and summarizes the answer with links to the sites it found them on.

For certain types of search it is a huge time saver of scrolling through results to find answers on various pages.

Over all bing search it self isn’t bad.

For a brief moment in time search engines were perfected. Then they veered off course. All of them did. Why though.

Remember when you could list vaguely some words related an obscure movie to Google. Then it would tell you the movie you're thinking of. That's been nerfed.

Tangentially related. What's the deal with search engines of online stores. It's like they aren't even search engines at all. They're doing nothing more than showing me products/sellers they want me to buy from. Digikey lets you drill down to precise specification filters. I wish all search engines could be like that.

duckduckgo.com only had 2 ads that were clearly identified when I just tried it. no idea how manipulated the rest of it is.

Have you tried https://search.brave.com?

Disclaimer: I work at Brave, but I think it's pretty good