A couple of months ago I was getting cross from Google. Whenever I would search North Korean news to not only research for myself but also post to Phuks I would be getting news from days or even weeks ago from only mainstream outlets (WSJ, NYT, BBC) rather than specialists (NKNews, DailyNK, 38North). I have no problem with those results but I do have a problem with it seemingly being the only choice presented. In other places, search was getting much more washed down. I could search for something specific and I would only receive more generalised results. Google images takes ages to load images, and you have to do a whole lot of drama to get a HD meme. A lot of people on Phuks presumably are against Google for ethical reasons. My annoyance is specifically because the "product" is getting worse.
I made the switch to Bing. By making it my default search engine on Brave I knew that it would be the best way to make the change without much drama. Search would be the same, difference is that I would be going to Bing instead.
There are a lot of things I do like about Bing. I wouldn't compare it to early Google. It feels more like a 2016/2017 Google before things got ultracorporatised. Just to make it clear, I'm not using Bing for security or privacy reasons. I'm using it purely for the product and wanting better results. To me, it appears to have the good features that Google paved over with so-called "improvements" to their algorithm.
Some of the results are absolute dog shite. I'll give credit to Google for being able to mostly keep out blogspam before making the push to primarily promoting news outlets at the top. This is the downside of having more of the results I wanted - the filtering isn't great but at the same time I don't want to ask for too much. Some of the results are more like the internet from 2009 with "DOWNLOAD MOVIE NOW" websites if you're not careful and old things like that.
About 20% of the time I do find myself going back to Google. Bing isn't perfect, it does the job 80% of the time. Depending on how you approach it, Google does seem to occasionally have a better understanding for what you're looking for. This is because Bing shows more results, has less knowledge, so even meme searches can have some weird results. Bing in my experience tends to omit results from Google Maps but they don't promote alternatives like OpenStreetMap well either. That forces me to go back to Google for that search.
My gripe with Google is that they're pushing "reputable" sources only. I will read them, but I specifically don't want them to be my only sources. The same thing happens on YT too where the top channels will be weird news channels uploading a 2 minute clip with 300 views. I want it to be there, I know I know, but it pisses me off that better results gets shoved down further. If I wanted to have content dictated to me I would watch TV.
Oh and the porn results are better too.
I use startpage and duckduckgo. Startpage can kind of suck when delivering results of specific things. Occasionally I'll use bing, bing's greatest strength is that it has geared itself to search porn quickly/effectively (it knows that porn is it's only way to compete with Google).