I’ve been using DuckDuck Go since leaving Google Search, but that seems to be the first step away. I’m not keen on their AI assist. I tried Start Page, but the first four results were ads. I don’t mind paying a small fee for good search. So Brave Search or Kagi?
Your first 100 searches are free so start with a free account. Like you I’ve started paying for stuff I used to get for free like search and emails but I do think it’s worth it if you aren’t breaking the bank to pay for it.
Kagi’s option to raise/lower/block sites is probably worth it on its own.
Plus despite reddit fighting hard against it, you can still get results that point to old.reddit.com. If you google with site:old.reddit.com it gives you new reddit results. Kagi has a similar problem, except in the advanced settings you can add a url rewrite that changes reddit.com to old.reddit.com 🙂
Sorry getting carried away but I love it as someone who does a fair bit of searching.