I live in a country which uses a language I don’t speak but Google defaults to regional results in spite of my language being set to English. All other engines give me really poor results (not that Google was giving good ones, the image search has really gone to shit since they started populating it with AI stuff).
I mix and match.
DuckDuckGo is my main one, but I often find myself just using bangs and either throwing in !brave or !g before some searches because sometimes the results aren’t as relevant as I’d like.
I obviously don’t like Google, but if I need super quick results, they’re typically better for me, though they’ve honestly become ridiculously terrible over the last couple of years.
Not just because of promoted content, but because they don’t even seem to care about syntax anymore.
If I put quotes around a search term, Google seems to ignore it. Why? Who knows.
As much as I have… let’s say mixed feelings about Brave, I find myself using !brave more and more on DDG. More relevant results, at least in my looooong experience of using DDG as my primary.
Startpage doesn’t like me because VPN or whatever, otherwise I’d use it more.
I sometimes use a SearxNG instance as well, but that’s only if I’m really struggling to find something.