For the people who have not yet decided on a search engine. The most EU way you can go is Ecosia or Qwant as they are building their own search index.
Ecosia is my personal pick as its also aimed at planting trees and they have quite a good browser alongside it.
I don’t know how far in the rabbithole I am, but at this point I feel like it’s nearly impossible to find a company that doesn’t have dirt on it in one way or another. There are alternatives in some domains, but for search engines, it’s really narrowed down to Brave (which also have some not very nice people in it) and Duck duck go, which uses Bing. Which is basically pointless to me, not even talking about using UE products, for me, the best way to get some fresh air is to have companies that have their own search engines (so, not Bing or Google, this is why I don’t use alternatives like Starpage or Searx) There’s Mojeek, yes, but last time I used it, it was…really bad. I still encourage them tho! I’ll give it another shot now.
To me there is also a topic no one is ready to talk about : the way we search the web. I changed the way I search the web. Most of the time I need to browse the same websites so I added keywords search for those search.
For Mojeek, I took time configuring “focuses” (a feature they have to limit the websites searched to a predefined subset).
I reduced my need of search engines globally and now I’d say I use Mojeek and there’s 50% chance I need to go to DuckDuckGo because Mojeek failed to give me my answers. When I started using Mojeek, I almost never found answers so I’d say it got better!
Google always suck for me except if I’m looking for products, the only domaineit shines but that’s kinda expected to be honest considering Google business model.