If you just want a free search engine, Brave is probably the best index. Bonus points to Marginalia for finding the obscure things Brave doesn't surface.
But if you want to go down the rabbit hole, it's easy to build your own metasearch engine and search several engines at once - an AI model can make one for you in a single night with just a small PHP script, if you have your own website / webost. In my case, the combination of Brave, Mojeek & Marginalia covers all my search needs.
Deeper down the rabbit hole, you can build your own search index with SQLite, as an additional index for your metasearch. There are projects like Hister that will help make your own search index: