Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing now all return the same shitty LLM-generated nonsense sites to most of my searches, and don't respect my literal search terms even when I put them in quotes.
yes. use any of the following, in no particular order:
ecosia.org - A non-profit certified B corp that plants trees by serving ads in your search results. Bing search underneath.
duckduckgo.com - A privacy friendly search engine. Primarily sourced from Bing but mixes in a few other sources.
any SearXNG instance - A self-hostable search front-end to various search engines.
marginalia.nu - specifically 'random' - An independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.
Are you (or is anyone here) daily-driving Stract yet? I discovered it a few months ago and thought it was everything I was looking for in a search engine, but also concluded that its search results aren't up to the standard I can use for now, so I filed it as one to look out for. Would be interested in hearing others' experiences.
I think Searx is a good suggestion. Can be a bit slow to return results because it runs the search on a bunch of search engines and compiles the results, but that helps to make sure better stuff rises to the top.