I'm glad others are interested in this topic and there is ongoing research. The current state of search engines is abysmal. My "plan" was to support DuckDuckGo as the alternative to Google, since they declined in quality so rapidly in the last few years with most results just pushing their own services or funneling you into product ads. But, DDG has been making a lot of misteps recently as well. Despite all the chest pounding they do about privacy, they still load tracking scripts on their domain and I feel their communication about it has been really poor and gives of scummy vibes.