I've started using Duckduckgo, less specifically for the search and more for the bangs. Fed up of search surfacing sites they care about. I can now quickly search wikipedia with !w etc.
Kagi has been amazing for me so far. I signed up as soon as they changed the pricing to allow unlimited searches at $10/mo.
I'm still working on my filters and promoting/demoting/pinning sites in my results, but it's already night-and-day better than Google and even DuckDuckGo (which still deserves much respect).
Looks promising if you're on a Mac/iOS setup, but I'm on Fedora Linux, so sadly they don't offer an option for that. If they ever offered Linux support in the future, I'd definitely give Kagi a try.
People aren't putting content much on the open web as they used to as well. Think the high point was when blogs were a thing, the second high point was during the Geocities et all free webspace peroid.