I realized how much of a marketing cesspool Reddit has become once I left it. That along with the whole doom scrolling has been toxic to my mental health. So I am much better off without it.
That said, the fediverse seems to be a little too small especially for niche topics. Plus the this world still needs some tool/interface to unify it and make it easier to use. I still go back reddit once in a while for those niche communities but I have logged out for the first time in a decade+ from reddit.
I have started focusing on my hobbies more, the whole reddit fiasco has been a reminder that it is not just FB that is bad, it is everything including Reddit and in time possibly places like this if it grows.
DDG has also become bad unfortunately. I used to add -site for quora and pinterest. But for some odd reason now a days it fails most of the time. Which has made the results very similar to Google. Plus they were always horrible at local search, atleast for most of the places where I lived.
https://search.brave.com/goggles - Is an interesting way of searching. But I just started using it recently. So still not sure about it.
https://kagi.com/ - Seems to be pretty decent, but it is paid.
But I am still searching. None of them seem to match old google. But that might be because the internet has changed with most of the actually useful information walled up.