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If you don’t mind paying a little I have found that Kagi is the best. Sure, the others mentions are free but subpar, even to google. Kagi is simply better but with the downside of a monthly subscription. I love that they are quite transparent with changelogs and stuff when the make changes.

Kagi.

The downside is that it costs $10 per month.

The upside is:

• Privacy first
• You can pin websites to the top of results, promote them so they appear higher, demote them so they appear lower, or have them completely removed
• Lenses - quickly tell Kagi what type of results you want (News sources, academic articles, forum posts, programming sites, small web, etc.)
• Snaps - search shortcuts kinda like bangs. Eg, typing @w is the same as typing site:wikipedia.com
• An actual good AI summary. Completely unobtrusive - only activated when you press the button, doesn’t overextrapolate your request, and will only source the same results that you get from the search
• Direct image results

When I first migrated a couple years ago, it was a bit worse than Google but pretty close. Nowadays, I find it to be much much better. It’s honestly close to how Google was back in 2015 before they made it garbage.