I've been experimenting with Kagi recently. At first I thought it was good but then I was searching for a model number for some niche Honda motor and Kagi wasn't any help. Neither was Duckduckgo
Google found it for me, though.
Having said that, I recently switched to Duckduckgo as my main search engine although I'm open to suggestions.
I agree that we need to get off of Google just because like you said - they are the gatekeepers. I don't trust a large company with that, much less Google
SearX