I personally think people are overreacting, but hey, we're on lemmy after all..
Earlier today I found many lemmians that suggested abolishing freedom of speech because of bigotry. They are absolutely nuts on here.
I use these instances: https://search.inetol.net/ https://search.hbubli.cc/ It's working great so far. The only issue im having is that it pulls Chinese results every once in a while.
Startpage seems like a pretty good alternative. I read their privacy policy and it looks pretty solid.
Another $10 subscription just to browse the web.. I don't think it's for me.
It's probably not that big of a deal, but I just don't want anything to do with Microsoft.
I've been trying to find a good privacy respecting browser, but I can't really decide on what to use. I don't like the search results with Brave Search. DuckDuckGo shares my information with Microsoft and SearchXNG shows me NSFW images even with strict search on. I really like Presearch, but I'm not really sure what they're about.
EDIT: After tinkering with the settings of my SearXNG instance, it seems to have reduced the amount of NSFW images. I think I will stick with SearXNG for now.
This is the best answer.
SearXNG seems to be free and private, checkmate!