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The expectation that a single search engine should do the job in all situations is misguided. Sometimes it is necessary to try two or three different ones in order to find the sufficient variety of sources, or just to find the specific thing you are looking for. The big ones that search you while you search for results are not listed here. Let's consider them obsolete! However, many of the alternatives only aggregate results from more established search engines, which means you don't really break out of their information silos.
Here's my take on a few I have tried. I'll also list some that I have little experience with.
DuckDuckGo. No presentation needed. Still not the amazingly good search results one would expect after several years in business.
Qwant. Has been around for a while. Seems to have better coverage of French and other European material than DDG and a few others.
Ecosia. Claims to plant trees. I hope so. Useable results.
SearX. I think they used to exist as several independent instances. The advanced settings are useful.
Startpage. "Anonymous google."
F.O.G. Another one when you really need to google (or yahoo/bing) anonymously.
https://search.fuckoffgoogle.net/
Mojeek. This one is worth a try. I think they do their own indexing instead of just aggregating results from others.
MetaGer. Very good at finding German stuff for you, and reasonably successful with other things as well.
The following ones may be fine, but I have limited experience with them.
Swisscows.
Brave.
Ghostery Glow. Dark themed, appears similar to DDG.
Right Dao.
You. Uses more AI than I'd spontaneously be inclined to.
Marginalia Search. A new search engine developed from scratch. The process of building it has been gemlogged here at the geminisphere. Very promising. Some searches give jackpots, but frequently your searches return a blank, no matter the word order. Wrong spellings are not pardoned.
Wilby. Specialises in small, personal, and old websites. Not general purpose.
FrogFind. Really a wrapper for DDG, but adapted for vintage computers.
Curlie. A "human-edited directory of the web" cannot be expected to cover everything, but might feature more quality content.
Search My Site. Open source, specialised in small personal web sites.
There are in fact a number of alternatives to wikipedia, and now there is also an effort to create a decentralised network of encyclopedias:
Here are two encyclopedia aggregators:
There are at least the following ones:
But the smolweb spirit of gemini encourages haphazard discoveries through gemrings (LEO and others), random links, and aggregators.
Collaborative Directory of Geminispace
Here is a less known gem orbit:
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