SearXNG

There are public instances, or you can self-host it.

Its a “meta search engine”, meaning that it aggregates, and reorganizes results from the indexes of whichever search engines you want (after removing AI, Ads, and sponsored content from those results).

You could set it to index only Google if you wanted, and you’d basically have pre-enshitified google. I have about 20 indexes active in my personal instance, but they have ~100 indexes that you can use, allowing you to see results that wouldn’t turn up on Google or DDG.

It’s free, and it works better than Google ever has.

I had been searching for a specific rare game ROM for literally years, to no avail. I ran one SearXNG querry, and found the ROM from the 2nd link on page 1 (that’s right, pages, none of this infinite scroll rigmarole).