Been a reasonably happy DuckDuckGo user for years. It has the SEO slop problems too, and they jumped the AI shark like everybody else, but you can turn the AI off at least and still have your search engine and chatbot be separate tools.

Google let the web descend into SEO slop long ago despite that they could have EASILY spotted and purged low quality over-verbose results and the sites that pooped them out. They make businesses pay to have the top sponsored result, when they're already the top organic result, but the ads are indistinguishable from real results now. They made the web worse for everyone to line their own pockets. Screw them.