

I don’t like that it’s not open source, and there are opt-in AI features, but I can highly, highly recommend Kagi from a pure search result standpoint, and one of the only alternatives with their own search index.
(Give it a try, they’ve apparently just opened up their search for users without an account to try it out.)
Almost all the slop websites aren’t even shown (or put in a “Listicles” section where they can be accessed, but are not intrusive and do not look like proper results, and you can prioritize/deprioritize sites (for example, I have gituib/reddit/stackoverflow to always show on top, quora and pinterest to never show at all).
Oh, and they have a fediverse “lens” which actually manages to reliably search Lemmy.
This doesn’t really address the future of crawling, just the “Google has gone to shit” part 😄
Matrix fits the bill.
Unless you don’t like the federated nature.