Best alternative search engine option that actually works?

I think, one of, the biggest problems here is that it is hard for smaller or startup search engines to grow their search indexes with good depth and breadth of results while remaining independent of indexes or crawlers from established “giants” like Google or Bing. To be clear, I’m not a search engine expert and these are just my surface level observations. Folks like @JojoYou will be more capable of giving you a detailed technical answer as to why building a quality independent search engine is so hard. Slightly off topic: discussing Duckduckgo (click for more details)