Over the past couple of years, the popular search engines haven't given me great results, and I've had to use a series of different engines, search operators, and dorks to prod out the search results I'm looking for, with mixed success. The front ends have also become a bit too feature rich for my use cases; I prefer a minimal front end with just search results, but most front ends have links to news, videos, drop downs, cards, cookie banners, SEO spam, and have too much javascript. Too much time spent loading and rendering the page, and too many requests, in my opinion. Instead, my search engine only take 1 HTTP request per search result page and is only a few KB in size.
Right now this project is still in the early stages, and mostly proxies bing's api with some minor adjustments, but if anyone is interested in testing it out here is the link to the search engine [0] and a link to the blog with an RSS feed to follow future updates [1].