My go to search engine is (please boost for greater exposure):

[wizardwes@mstdn.games]

@ctt SearxNG for me

[samueljohnson@mstdn.social]

@ctt SearXNG (self-hosted), the noai version of DDG for trivial lookups.

[lhauser@mefi.social]

@ctt Kagi is so absolutely worth every penny I pay for it.

[si2mev@mastodon.social]

@ctt Startpage or Qwant, but ddg is also good.

[thollief@stereophonic.space]

@ctt qwant.com

[d_rift@beige.party]

@ctt Lycos is still around (I've been told; doesn't work for me), and in Europe Seznam (Czech based) can be helpful. I'm trying to switch to more directory services like Curlie. https://curlie.org/

[d_rift@beige.party]

@ctt Links from video descriptions and references from the bottom of wikipedia pages have also been more useful to me lately than direct searches.

[athesis@xn--ratatskr-r4a.de]

@ctt Selfhosted SearxNG

[thesunnyone@social.treehouse.systems]

@ctt we are currently testing out one called Qwant

[hypolite@friendica.mrpetovan.com]

@ctt StartPage from DuckDuckGo whose search result relevance recently fell off a cliff.

[amosmulder@mastodon.social]

@ctt startpage

[akamran@indieweb.social]

@gary @ctt yeah, I've made this my default almost everywhere.

[needlethread@c.im]

@ctt I use searXNG, so a little bit of everything really

[martinlentink@mastodon.social]

@ctt Qwant

[tiggy@mastodonapp.uk]

@ctt

Noaiduckduckgo

[cal@kind.social]

@edhaswell @ctt
Same here, in the same order

[wizardofdocs@wandering.shop]

@ctt no-AI Google

[newt@stereophonic.space]

@ctt the internet is made of demons. Why would I want to search anything in it?

[climatejenny@biodiversity.social]

@ctt Yeah, Startpage. Good enough.

[mons1serrata@mastodon.social]

@ctt

Firstly: Perplexity: answer and search machine
Secondly: Google: search machine