Competitor isn't a word I could use to describe the web search scene in regard to google. However if one wanted a good search engine that one didn't have to keep banging on the keyboard for a half decent result I could say Yandex is one of the larger search engines that's performing really well on a lot of tech and niche areas compared to google or even duckduckgo atm.

I though am pretty biased for I don't put up with things that pretend to be something - from 2015 google was more interested in serving me ads and spam, duckduckgo easily was better, searx for hard to find things that sometimes didn't turn up in DDG. This year, DDG has declined hard, presently I use it - if it offers a few nice looking links, fair enough, if it misses I try google for simple stuff, but I really need some good links, then Yandex. However it's not the first time if I can't even get much more than 20 results from DDG, (google from 2015 rarely offered me any more than 20 links, I guess as I used to be a very heavy search user I qualified for a special test pattern) Yandex almost always faithfully lists pages of links to check out.

Recently a half decent search site albeit specialised, was posted at HN, [1] I've got to say of the dozens offered at HN I've checked out it it was a gem for it: (a) displayed a site which seems to aim to be a fairly serious search site, (b) functioned as well as one would expect any serious search site would aim to, (c) actually performed really well returning results to some hard questions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48442875

Edit to clarify [1] is a specialised not a general search site.

The only FOSS-ethos search engine is Marginalia. https://search.marginalia.nu

It makes money from a partnership with Kagi

I mostly just use Perplexity nowadays, for sheer speed of search -> information gained AI tools with RAG capabilities that dont hallucinate wildly are usually pretty solid.

I'm using a number of paid per-search like exa / tavily + SearXNG, wrapped in a cli, often with agents doing deep research-ish