I’ll go first. I’ve used a lot of search engines, I used duckduckgo for quite some time but found their search results kinda bad. I’m currently using ecosia the search results are similar to ddg’s but at least I’m planting trees, so there’s that.
duckduckgo primarily, but have been starting to dabble with a self hosted Whoogle.
SearX-NG, coming off DuckDuckGo it wasn’t a major change in the internal structure (the search gets relayed over to a larger search engine), but there’s no one company behind it like DDG. They’ve been working together with Microsoft on some rather sketchy things.
I would still love to self-host something decent (that doesn’t relay over to a company), but nothing like that exists as far as I know.
From what i know the exemption thing was only in the app and has been removed by now and so far the alternatives are… Not very Suitable for everyday use, at least for me.
For the moment I am using brave search not on brave browser but as a firefox add-on, a fine tuned searx.be and perplexity.ai, which isnt a search engine but a connected chatgpt ai with links in the answers.