At least use Brave search.

Most search engines—even supposedly “neutral” or “private” ones—don’t have their own index. They’re just façades that rely exclusively on third-parties. At Brave, we want to build our own search index, because this means independence. And independence means choice. Choice for the user to have alternatives, and choice that allows Brave to not be beholden to the policies of third parties (e.g. censorship, biases, economic interests, etc).

Brave Search beta is based on an independent index, the first of its kind. However, for some queries, Brave can anonymously check our search results against third-party results, and mix them on the results page. This mixing is a means-to-an-end toward 100% independence. For full transparency and to measure Brave’s progress toward that goal, Brave provides a “Results independence” metric. This anonymous calculation shows the % of search results that come from Brave versus these third parties. Note that no matter the independence metric, your privacy will always be 100%.

I've noticed the search results have been getting better and better quite quickly, to the point where my Brave results get me the answer I was looking for faster than Google (mostly for programming stuff).

Google is unironically by far the best for most searches (these not manipulated). It also integrates the Google Books search.