Kagi is the only search engine I use which has really good results and no junk links. …and you have to pay for it, of course. It’s a meta search engine but they use their own indexes for news results and Teclis, which indexes small commercial sites with fewer than 5 trackers. One of the cool features it added recently was an icon for identifying paywalled articles.
I’d like to recommend Mojeek, my default search engine, but it still has a way to go. If you’re just looking for an “answer engine” rather than a general search engine…I guess an LLM probably isn’t a bad place to start?