I’ve been using DuckDuck Go since leaving Google Search, but that seems to be the first step away. I’m not keen on their AI assist. I tried Start Page, but the first four results were ads. I don’t mind paying a small fee for good search. So Brave Search or Kagi?
SearXNG is good. If you’re not self-hosting, make sure to have a shortlist of alternative instances. I like instances that pull from google, but those also tend to suffer from rate-limiting.
What is your goto instance? I use https://searx.foss.family/
It’s a toss-up between opnxng.com, priv.au, and searx.tiekoetter.com for me since they all don’t have perfect uptimes. I have a bias for ones with shorter URLs and sometimes I wonder if other people do too.