What to use instead of Google?

Well I thought of this as 'suitable for my parents' advice, so I guess the answer is, don't use search. Way too many scam and semi-scam sites. Go with word of mouth instead.

Oh and obviously people need ad blockers. Many scam baits in those.

Startpage is haflway decent. Ecosia as well.

Set one or the other as the default search engine in Firefox, throw on ublock origin and privacy badger, tell your older parents that this is the latest and greatest and that everyone is using it these days.

I switched to DuckDuckGo mostly because google likes to ignore some of my search terms which I find infuriating.