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 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.