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Tried the Qwant privacy-oriented search engine, but it's much weaker than Google. It couldn't find my own web page or maps to local buildings.
@peterdrake the number of search engines that maintain their own indexes is small but interesting. This article pretty comprehensively covers the options: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/
The trick, I think, is to use them in different situations than you would one of the big engines. For instance, I really enjoy using https://search.marginalia.nu/ at those times when I search for some device hoping to find interesting ways people are using it and DDG just gives me product reviews.
@peterdrake yeah I like the concept but Google has set the bar really high.
Google sprung on the scene using page-rank, it was un-gamed at the time. They've since evolved many times over adding dumber and dumber things to their indexing (since the world is their SEO slave). Any competitor has a tough road ahead, and would need to have a "submit url for indexing" -- and the infrastructure to handle it. Personalization is beneficial for any competitor trying to give you the results you want and your very different neighbor 500 miles and a decade-in-age away, but even that is counter-productive to the privacy mess were in. This could be accomplished with the marketing tricks most already use -- personas. Let the engine guess the persona of the searcher, or the searcher tell the engine, the nature of the search. Even then the searcher needs to be part of the process of educating the search engine -- and once again we are back to slurping up user data and behavior.
@peterdrake Qwant is in large part just a front end to Bing, similar to DuckDuckGo. Your failed searches surprise me. I wonder if it's because they optimize things for France?