To what? I'm unaware of any decent alternatives, unfortunately. I have all my defaults set to DuckDuckGo, but as soon as I search anything remotely uncommon, I end up having to switch to Google (although at least you can block the ad results with Ublock Origin browser extension).
I’ve had very good luck with a paid account at kagi.com. They have many filtering options to remove sites you don’t ever want to see (like Pinterest, allrecipes.com, etc.).
valuing my privacy is brilliant, and I’ve tried all these engines, but on all occasions I’ve had to go back to google because they’re just not good enough:
poor results from anything longer than 2 keywords, no (consistent) quote search - which is a huge dealbreaker for me, no maps equivalent, no or little info about local businesses, and more.
google is successful because it’s very, very good, and if it was easy to beat it, it would have happened by now. yes there’s a lot of seo spam, but 99 times out of 100, Google knows what I’m looking for, which I can’t say for the others
I still have to fall back to Google sometimes but DDG covers a good 80% of my search usage just fine. Any amount of switching is better than none at all, even if just to push back against Google's hegemony however we can.
