Sign up for the Kagi trial (100 free searches) & see for yourself. If garbage floats to the top, you can easily block the domain or lower its ranking in your results by mousing over the shield to the right of the search result. If you find blog/enthusiast sites you like, raise their ranking in your results the same way.

It does. They also have filters you can apply to your query to further restrict the results for things like small web (blogs and niche forums, using the Marginalia index AFAIK) and forums (Reddit and so forth), so that you don’t have to resort to appending “Reddit” to your searches.

Kagi is basically $20/month to time travel back to 2014-era Google with extra features. It’s fantastic and well worth it. I can’t recommend it enough.

Edit: Upon checking my billing it’s $10/mo, not $20. All the better!

Yea, you'd use the "small web" lens: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html

(I swear I don't work for Kagi haha, I just love this product so much)

Yes, you can ask it for small web results and they are mostly personal websites.

They filters out sites with ads or trackers. The results are clean sites. Some blogs/old sites do have ads so it's not exactly like google. Naturally Porn / nsfw types site are missing.