I came across the following website from a tech in Singapore that compares search engines. May try some on the list.
An interesting tidbit that he mentions about the different search engines is whether the countries of their HQ are members of an International ‘spying’ org. such a Five Eyes inferring that even private search engines in these countries are not totally private.
13 Privacy-Focused, Alternative Search Engines to Google
https://ahrefs.com/blog/alternative-search-engines/
hey, thanks for that. I’m tempted to go back to using a vpn