Avoid Google for discovery. It’s not great anymore. Use DuckDuckGo, Qwant, or Yandex instead. For deeper but less precise results, try Mojeek or Marginalia.

I went with Kagi. It costs some money, but they have a special deal with Google to get access to their API. It's basically their search results without the AI slop, ads and BS. It works just like Google worked back in the good, old days.

Let's see how long this will last. But I will enjoy it as long as I can.

Kagi also has a news section. I'm not entirely sure which sites they pull from, but on a first glance it looks more clean and less sloppy than the ones from the big players.

Edit: They explain how they aggregate those news here.