I tend to use DuckDuckGo most of the time, but its quality has collapsed considerably. Google is terrible now and only worth it for reverse image search. I haven’t tried Brave much and SearX-NG was a pain to set up for being a de-facto Google and Bing wrapper. There’s Kagi but I don’t really have $120/yr for a search engine, nor do I want to deal with how they handle logins and session management.
I use DDG. It’s getting worse, but it is still better than Google. At some point I might switch to Yandex.
Does China have any good search engines for English content? I’d consider Baidu but it is not practical to use if you don’t read Mandarin (though you can still query in English and get English results).
Also, for DDG heads looking to try something else, you might be interested in a browser plugin like this to keep DDG “bang” behavior with other search engines. I cannot vouch for this extension in particular though aside from pointing you to the same review page I just looked at.
I mean, given the internet situation in China, I doubt you’d be able to find anything that provides usable results if you live in the USA.
Depends on what you’re looking for. You won’t find western social media posts in the results the way you do on Google / DDG, but if you are trying to research technological / academic subjects you will probably do fine.