I live in a country which uses a language I don’t speak but Google defaults to regional results in spite of my language being set to English. All other engines give me really poor results (not that Google was giving good ones, the image search has really gone to shit since they started populating it with AI stuff).
I’ve been exclusively using DuckDuckGo until recent controversies, then switched to Metager. It is a privacy-oriented, opensource metasearch engine and they aren’t relying on bing/google search results like almost every other search engine.
Results are really good and consistently relevant. But it has some minor annoyances, and recently metager started locking more and more features behind a paywall. I’ll keep using it if I won’t find better alternative.
What controversies? I’m out of the loop and I use duckduckgo
My guess is it was the situation where DDG couldn’t block Microsoft trackers in their tracking blocker applications (their browser and browser extension and not the search itself), because of the contract they had with Microsoft to use the bing search index for DDG search. I believe the problem was resolved, and never affected the search itself.
I’ll give metager a go. Thank you. :)