This year has been extraordinary for Kagi ( https://kagi.com ).
Kagi is a paid alternative to ad-supported search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo. It has recently revised its pricing model, reducing the cost for a plan with unmetered searches from $25 per month to $10.
Kagi boasts the following (and more) features:
Blocking or boosting specific domains in your search results
"Lenses", which are individual setting profiles (e.g. region locks, domain whitelists) that can be applied to search queries
All of the Bangs that DuckDuckGo has (e.g. type "!yt" in front of your query to immediately search on youtube.com)
Universal Summarizer, which works with any website, PDF document, YouTube video and more
This blog post goes into full details about Kagi's capabilities.
Why on earth would I pay $10 a month for search when I can get everything I need using SearXNG? For Free.
It costs me exactly $0.00 to run SearXNG locally using Podman and WSL to host the docker image. It Just Works; and I don't have to worry about paying money every month to anyone; nor do I ever have to count my search queries as precious.
Unfortunately this "$10/month = Unlimited" is also likely to be available only for a limited time; and once Kagi feels it has enough users; then you'll be stuck back on some arbitrary number of searches each month.
Worse is logging in. To search. Yuck.
There are so many "Public" SearXNG instances as well for the less-than-technical; https://searx.space/
All of them provide the option(s) to use whatever engines you'd like.
Yeah, it's technical topics I care about, and have a hard time with in current search engines.
There is so much noise caused by celebrity news, current events, "hot topics", politics, "top 10" list spam, SEO gaming....etc that searches on Google, bing, and ddg are just frustrating.