I stopped using Google 5 years ago. The combination of SEO blogspam dominating the first page results, and the mass surveillance they engage in, made me want to change. I don't miss it, it has many worthy replacements.

My thoughts on the search engines things I tried:

0. Bing: pretty much the same as Google, I stopped using it for privacy reasons. I'd use it if I was a Linux user and MS didn't have my Windows activity to cross-reference Bing data with.

1. DuckDuckGo: was a great alternative, until I found out last year they censor search results for political reasons (downranking/delisting "Russian misinformation"). I dropped them then.

2. Brave: pretty good most of the time, the one I trust the most for privacy, but too many counterculture sites not listed. Like you search for a meme and the results are not some major sites. Is fine otherwise.

3. Yandex: great search results but I stopped using it because despite only doing 10-15 searches a day, I trip their bot detection (I use Firefox configured to resist fingerprinting, uBlock Origin, etc). If I was your basic b*tch "Chrome user watching 1000 ads a day", I'd stick to this.

Google remains the best one for location-aware search, such as local businesses.