Firefox is financed by Google and makes them survive (but yes, clearly the only realistic alternative that is not Chromium-based)

Zen browser. Or floorp.

Google Search is over. There may not be a free alternative, it they've lost the arms war between phone number incrementing ad pages, AI spew, and rank hackers.

Have you tried Kagi yet? It's pretty popular among HN folks, and I find it easily worth the price.

I use ddg and haven't found better results from searching with google in a long time, but that might just be the kind of things I search for.

I've been using ddg for years now, and it's heen probably 2 years since I needed to use the "!g" escape hatch.

Very very happy with it.

DDG is good enough that I've switched many year ago and never went back. Any time I use Google (!g) to repeat query (recently it's maybe a few times per year) it fails to show anything useful too, so I don't see any benefit to even check it lately.

Maybe have to pay for search? I am experimenting with paying Proton another $10/month for a paid lumo+ account. lumo+ is a private chat like ChatGPT that uses a strong Mistral model and also privacy-preserving web_search LLM tooling under the hood. For about a month I just use lumo+ with the web_search tool enabled. I may not do this forever, but for now I like just having one tool to use. Note: I still use gemini for technical work, but lumo+ for day to day chat and web search.

In the past I just use DuckDuckGo for most search, occasionally Google. That also worked well for me.

Kagi

Might want to try https://www.mojeek.com/ .

have you tried Kagi?