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.
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.
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.