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’ve been using DDG since I heard about it. The quality of results has indeed dropped recently but I just assumed that was because the quality of all the other engines dropped too. I always thought they just pulled from Google & Bing and stripped out the crap, but maybe they don’t?
Anyway, I haven’t found a better engine that you don’t have to pay for. Kagi I hear is pretty good but you have to pay for x number of searches per month and I’m not about to worry about how many searches I’ve done per month.
Kagi is 5/mo for 300 searches (which is nothing for me, a compulsive searcher) and 10/mo for unlimited. I want to avoid spending 120/yr if I don’t need to.
Kagi has an unlimited plan for $10/mo. If search is important for you or if you need it for a job I haven’t seen anything that beats kagi so far.