Time to ungoogle my phone once again. Did it before, reverted it in a stupid move to try out Monster Hunter "Go"; should've never done it in the first place. Bye, bye, Google. Go fuck yourself.
0xCAFE
It's not like they'd develop a new engine for iOS. They already have one which can now be used for iOS as well -- but not everywhere.
Yeah, agreed, Marginalia's more suited to discover small-web type of content.
Another thing that'd be better as a daily driver, but requires manual curation, is to filter out specific domains in your searches. Brave supports that with the Goggles feature, Mojeek calls it Focus. AFAIK Kagi too has a similar feature.
I don't know any search engine that's able to fully exculde paywalled content though.
Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but Marginalia () focuses on non-commercial and text-based content.
I'm not aware of any functionality which allows to block messages from unknown users. I think blocking them might be your only option right now.
Easier said than done (and already too late for you), I know, but: in general, be careful where you leave your number...
Mojeek has it's own index. DuckDuckGo, Qwant and Brave have a partial index mixed with meta search results.
They're talking too much business to be a 'private' search. They don't make any effort to explain how their search is private at all (except the 90/10 share model).