I don't think you sound confrontational, but neither do I consider my internet searching particularly advanced. A lot of my searches are exactly what you describe, and a lot is trying to find a good research rabbit hole to go down. Call me curious.

I'm just sceptical, primarily of Google Search's inroads into surveillance monetisation and effective monopoly. For the same reasons I am as critical of the other "market leaders" you mention; I don't consider the ability to inspire brand loyalty in millions of consumers to sell crap products a quality 🤷

DuckDuckGo is just Bing wearing a duck hat

There's nothing perfect. I use Kagi which uses many other indexes including Google, but with a focus on "small web" results and no ads or mandatory AI nonsense.

...but it costs money.

Well worth it in my opinion. My results have been better than Google for me, and I've been using it for like a year now. Highly recommend.

Mojeek https://www.mojeek.com/

How is DuckDuckGo shitty? It suits me fine.

It's like the fucking 90s all over again but for completely different reasons.

I daily DDG but !g bang out to Google 80% of the time

Hit the back button once this month though - DDG was better than Google!!!

Has only happened twice I’ve noticed in a year!

DDG, pls use my data to be less terribly terrible (and stop rearranging results, as reported years ago)

PS: will get Kagi once I find a job cuz too lazy or something to get into SearXNG properly like I should. And Mullvad’s got Leta btw which like bundles searches for privacy

well there’s european based search engines like marginalia-search.com (but it mainly uses keywords, but has search filters at the bottom of the search result) and stract.com (which is in beta), I’d like to see if there’s more tho

Brave uses their own index

Duckduckgo does plenty with its advanced search operators, which are pretty similar to Google's. * is a wildcard, meaning if you were to search c*y, results word return something including a sequence beginning with 'c' and ending with 'y', but having any sequence of characters in between them.

Pretty sure Yandex at least allows for all of those search operators. As far as meta search engines, basically anything that uses google's results like Startpage will also likely support them.

So, this is not a proper answer to your question. (The closest I'd give there, personally, is DDG, Qwant or Ecosia, all with their own caveats). But, I've been evangelizing a bit in favour of helping Mwmbl develop further.

Basically, it is an attempt to do for search engines what Wikipedia did for encyclopedic knowledge. It's still basically just a dream with an interface that's experimental and a search index still being built, currently seemingly bottlenecked by available (monetary) resources.

Oh, and a matrix community, where the actual community work seems to be happening.

But even though it's an infant with not that much more than a dream at this moment - I think their project shows promise, in audacity to challenge search engine giants alone, if nothing else. Currently, I am using it as my go to "first search" search engine, helping with curating results if possible (although, truth be told, in the past weeks most searches did not give anything useful at all). I also have the index building web crawling script running on the same server as my Fediverse instances - but there is also a firefox extension for more casual volunteer crawling without a cli script.

I can't sell this as a "proper" search engine, but still, am happy in evangelising it to anyone interested in supporting what tries to become a proper, open search engine not just on FOSS software, but FOSS principles.

Yeah kagi is still good. I've been using it for a while and am very happy.

Kagi is great if you have the change to spare.