@timbray maybe you already know, lately I heard good things about kagi¹ but not tried it yet. It's a paid service with a small free tier (50 searches per month). I just made an account to try and it was able to find your blog piece.

But I really don't know if this is the business model I would like to see for a search engine, I would like more on something paid by taxes, with public code, public index and accessible to everyone.

¹ https://kagi.com/