I live in a country which uses a language I don’t speak but Google defaults to regional results in spite of my language being set to English. All other engines give me really poor results (not that Google was giving good ones, the image search has really gone to shit since they started populating it with AI stuff).
I use DuckDuckGo and am happy with it
Honestly the search bangs are the killer duckduckgo feature. I started using it because I was upset with Google hiding search results, but it’s being able to easily search any search engine that keeps me using it.
What’s that?
Search bangs let you search using any search engine from duckduckgo. So you can type “!g” before your search to search Google. “!w” for wikipedia, “!a” to search Amazon, etc. They have a page on duckduckgo that lets you search all the different search bangs, most every website with a search is included and has multiple search bangs that work. If you don’t remember any of the shortened commands, you can usually safely fall back on a longer one (ie if you don’t remember !a for Amazon you could do !amazon).
The dealbreaker for me with DDG is they use Apple maps as default and don’t let you change it.
Not exactly the solution you’re looking for but starting a search on DDG with “!gm” will search google maps directly.