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.
Mojeek and Startpage. Mojeek is independent of other search engines, but you can still directly use them via the buttons on the bottom if the results are not satisfying. Also, you can use it cookieless for directly searching.
I haven’t touched startpage since it was a Google wrapper, it looks better now.