promoting the “small web”

That's reasonably interesting, Since they're artificially raising the small web results, I wonder what they do to make sure the results are still accurate.

The end really is that I can have confidence that my results will be relevant from the first result -- no sponsored content, no ads, no unwanted AI slop

I get that with searx, when it reduces the sources you only gets the like hits so it ends up filtering out garbage/ads. I use Qwant+Google+Bing and the outcome is pretty clean top hit is almost always right, it's at least as good as google was in the late 2000's