Maybe this explains why the result quality is so terrible. I’ve found Brave Search to be surprisingly good, and even the likes of Metager/Mojeek to be better than they used to be relative to the big players. DDG is not too bad, but went noticeably downhill when Bing started introducing AI features - presumably since these are largely not included in DDG, the remaining original search mechanisms aren’t as good.
I really feel like we’ll be back to starting web rings and distributing bookmark files etc soon though. Relying more on community resources than faceless companies that will undoubtedly be looking for the next way to screw us over.