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

[v_d_richards@literatur.social]

@ctt
Quant

[davidhund@waag.social]

@ctt startpage

[ligfries@mastodon.green]

@ctt a mixture of sources. Always AI disabled. When I already know roughly it can be any. Otherwise ask #mastodon.

[roturier@mastodon.partipirate.org]

@ctt
SearX via BOC47
@boc47

[laryllan@nerdculture.de]

@ctt
Qwant
@dianea

[ra@mstdn.social]

@ctt https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s

[thibaultmol@en.osm.town]

@ctt Currently maining #Uruky but there are cases when Kagi (unfortunately) is better. (but I'm doing my best to provide feedback to Uruky dev to improve things).

And Uruky is improving every week.
Yesterday my feature request for a one click link to the Wayback Machine version of a page got added.
This week they also added post-search filtering so that filetype: searches only return that actual filetype (cause some providers don't support it and might just return filetypes that don't match)

[thibaultmol@en.osm.town]

@ctt https://uruky.com/whats-new
They added AI filtering based on open source ai slop lists as well for example

[nocci@social.ism.yt]

@ctt

searx ​​

[marcusdeh@social.doescher.me]

@ctt I'm quite happy with qwant. I use startpage when i don't find something, but that happens, idk, once or twice a month. Probably switching to a self hosted searxng instance soon.

[kaia@pleroma.soykaf.com]

@ctt Yandex for images

[normandunbar@mastodon.scot]

@ctt Actually, it's noai.duckduckgo.com for me.

[qccechris@mastodon.social]

@gary @ctt This is my default, too.

The waterfox / Qwant has peaked my interest reading above in the thread.

[edhaswell@ohai.social]

@ctt

Qwant or noai.duckduckgo

[movation@fnordon.de]

@ctt a blend, really. for some things startpage, sometimes duckduckgo, Google but only with the udm14 frontend. never bing

[teflontrout@beige.party]

@urlyman @ctt I like them but they partner w brave too so meh

[alexadeswift@lgbtqia.space]

@ctt

1. StartPage
2. Qwant

[rozeboosje@masto.ai]

@ctt DuckDuckGo NoAI, to be precise

[urlyman@mastodon.social]

@TeflonTrout thanks for the heads up

[sinvega@mas.to]

@ctt startpage, but they started with the fucking pissbots in a side panel not long ago too, so it's only a matter of time

occasionally use marginalia but that's very prone to finding nothing at all