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.
I’m not ready to pay for search, yet.
Is there any alternative?
I use Qwant sometimes but it’s sourced from Bing. Searx is better if you can self-host. Kagi is better if you can afford to pay (but you asked for free).
There’s also Startpage, also pretty good. That has search results from Google and a bit of Bing though, so if that’s a dealbreaker, then yeah.
Doesn’t Kagi offer X amount of free searches per month before you pay?
No. They have a trial of 100 one-time searches, but that’s it.