Kagi is an underrated superpower. It just works. I tried Google again recently, and I was astonished how mediocre the results were. If that's the gold standard for no-cost searching, the internet is in serious trouble.
I am totally not affiliated with kagi but since I started using it, I haven't gotten pissed at my search engine for sucking ass.
OH! Another feature that actually works on Kagi: Date filtering! Never again will you set that date filter to the last two weeks and receive results that were posted in 2005.
They build their own index: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-competition.html
I’d love it if instead of ‘magic’ we just had a search engine that let you be the magician with a better query language and ux filters.