I use Bing because it gives points at ~$120/yr sent to the FSF. I asked FSF and they validated that they get what MSFT says they send.

Regarding more privacy-based search engines, I perceive the privacy argument from corporate search as marketing. Any corporate search engine should be selling your data to maximize profit, even if you pay monthly.

I've really been enjoying Kagi. They seem to have a pretty good privacy policy as well. However Searxng is probably the best for privacy since it's self hosted.

nogoo.me

I use Brave Search (yeah from the browser) and it works pretty good. Their privacy policy seems fairly robust at least according to my understanding and they have their own index, so they don't rely on Google or Bing, which allows them to filter out the SEO Spam rampant on other engines.

I use duckduckgo. It is Bing but with more privacy. You could try also searx, swisscows, startpage or qwant

SearXNG: https://github.com/searxng/searxng

It enhances and respects privacy,
is open source and self hostable,
and queries multiple configurable search engines (google, bing, brave, duckduckgo, ...)

You can find a list of public hosted instances here:
https://searx.space/

However I prefer to slap an instance randomizer on top, so each of my queries goes through another public SearXNG instance, for more privacy, and mostly, to bypass rate-limiting after frequent queries.

For this I use:

• On Desktop - GimmeASearX:
  https://github.com/demostanis/gimmeasearx
• On the go - SearX NeoCities:
  https://searx.neocities.org/

I self host my own SearXNG instance. I use that.

I also use DuckDuckGo. If I find I’m not seeing the results I want i just add !g anywhere and the search gets sent over to Google, though I don’t find I need to do that very often.

This is probably the best resource for keeping track of which search engine options exist and what their quality is like: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes

For a "fire and forget" option that doesnt require any configuration you cant go wrong with good ol DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com

If you're okay with dealing with more configuration and breakage then Searx can be pretty powerful as its a metasearch engine that can search with every search engine you tell it at once and agregate the results(while proxying things to maintain privacy): https://searx.space (had decent luck with the https://search.sapti.me instance if you just wanna try it out without searching through a list of options)

Also all search engines are kinda bad due to SEO spam and "AI" generated images and articles polluting the results, consider using uBlacklist to help you filter out the trash from search results(think of it like ublock origin for search engine results), can use it for basically any search engine so no reason to not set it up: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

Anyone of the many SearXNG instances is your best choice for balancing privacy and quality results. It's open source, sources multiple search engines which you can control, is anonymous, and provides solid results. Here's a list of active SearXNG instances: https://searx.space/

Start Page. Google results without the Google.

Or duckduckgo

Stop using search engines and start using ai. Especially ai that links to sources is much better than weeding out the heavily influenced search results. Using ai is like opening 10 search results finding the relevant sources and comparing them all to bother the information down to a digestible nugget.