Honestly, I'd stick with Qwant. I know right now it is still using Google but between them and Ecosia they're creating a European index.

I'd rather support them now and show we really do want this.

Ecosia and Qwant work great for me, both are working together on their own search engine releasing this year in France and Germany and hopefully globally next year

I'm on duckduckgo, which is American, but is a relatively small private company that doesn't seem to be actively participating in global evil as far as I can tell.

Ecosia works great for me.

Dunno about other search engines, but Opensearch and Elasticsearch are databases, not search engines. (Openseach is a fork of Elasticsearch, actually.)

Kagi is a different approach, but it's also American so it doesn't help here. Many AI LLMs are effectively hyper optimized search engines, and there are at least non-US controlled LLMs you can try. But for traditional web search, the entire world was happy to let Google dominate the space, while Microsoft spent billions to chase a distant second place. There is very little oxygen left for any other competitors and the remaining slice of the pie is so small and the barrier to entry so high it's basically impossible for anyone else to be effective nevermind profitable.

Edit: It's also worth mentioning the EU is trying to do something about this but in typical European bureaucratic/academic fashion I can't make heads or tails of what exactly they want to do and frankly it doesn't sound like they know either, probably in a few decades they'll have built something really impressive.

I use Ecosia, while I understand it uses the Google and Bing results I am glad to hear they are working with another french company to index the web. I personally use pihole to block the ads but I know it goes against Ecosia’s mission.

Gigablast used to be great, but they vanished with no warning a few years ago. It was run by a small team, or maybe one guy, who posted frequently about how difficult it was to make a search engine when so many sites block them now (but don't block Google.) So, I think maybe he just decided it wasn't worth it anymore.

I use Kagi. It's an American company that has their own index and also delegates their searches to other providers. They're not very competent but the search engine works quite well