Kagi is what I settled on a couple of years ago. I do think sometimes the fawning is over the top, but it is a solid search engine and tended to give me a bit better results than Google out of the box. The real win, though, is that you can give various sites a weight, so the search results will prefer or avoid sites according to your desires. Once I had that going, my search results tended to be much better than Google.

I don’t fawn, I just pay and use-and-forget. It’s almost to the point where it’s a little mental bump when I have to make a browser use it again, setting up something new.

Kagi has a pile of features I’m not getting the benefit of too, I’m sure, because it’s just-search, mostly, to me.

That’s fine; I know what I’m supporting, and I know that I’m the customer and not the product.

Because I wouldn't want Google to know what links I click on. When I used to use Google, and they added such redirects that included the destination URL as a parameter, I'd edit the link to make it just that URL before resolving it. This new scheme would make that impossible.

I use a Firefox extension to rewrite those Google redirects into plain links, to remove Google tracking of which links I click. The extension is broken now

Blocking URL shorteners and google-ad links yes! Personally for me it's also the fact that this is effectively an unresolvable URL shortener, store that link somewhere and it will most likely be dead. Can't copy link anymore and paste it on a notepad or chat app to check it out later as there isn't a guarantee it will load at all (ie: the problem with url shorteners).