Kagi was appealing to me as well, especially the quality of their results. However the requirement for a user profile (allowing them to build a profile based on your searches) and their involvement with AI soured me.
Would possibly pay for a search engine if it could somehow avoid the above pitfalls.
On this note, I've been having a decent run with Qwant. No AI chatbot, seems to be referencing some of the big indexes but also recently partnered with Eccosia to start working on building an independent index.
Mojeek was underwhelming but I'll try it again