If you need something related to daily life/hobby then use “site:reddit.com [search here]” honestly reddit still contains decent results about niche topics.

If you are searching for news items you almost need to use “before:[date]” for better context otherwise its impossible to find useful information, every news article is filled with SEO mumbo jambo and makes every news about a topic today the same as it was years ago and that is not what you want.

Otherwise unless you end up searching for something with a reasonable wikipedia page that is your destination most of the time because every other alternative is as bad or worse.

Depends what you’re after, there’s also 4get.ca, yandex.ru, baidu.com (can get a browser addon to translate), mojeek.com, bing, wolfram alpha, qwant, and dogpile.com. Nerds on racist tech sites with money to burn swear by kagi but I couldn’t say since aside from vpn I don’t pay for online services. I’ll probably think of more search engines in a moment.

As someone that does this as one of my jobs (pays way more than my main gig), somewhat concerning.