When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.
When it comes to Google, I find it completely absurd how people are OK with a giant ad / spy company saving and profiting from their private searches. Their entire lives, every sensitive query, stored in their databases. Why is this accepted? Completely shocking actually.
They are basing their entire profit model on spying on users privacy and selling it to advertisers. Doesn't that make you sick to your stomach?
If you want best effort, use DDG as your main search. If the first query doesn’t bring back what you want add g! to it and it will redirect to Google. yt! goes to YouTube, b! goes to bing, w! Wikipedia, etc.
Big fan of kagi.com. rock-solid privacy policy (seriously, I am one of those guys who read them all, this is probably the best I have seen), excellent search results and very nice features (lensed to search in specific contexts only - say, programming, up/down ranking of sites as you prefer, automatic rewriting of urls, custom bangs). The cons, is that it's a paid service. I am personally a customer since November 2022, never looked back.