• so yeah, Google is Google, the very definition of SEO – to the point now they will completely ignore your query to show you “relevant” results
• and Bing is Microsoft, ’nuff said – although I hear they seem to be THE choice for porn searches …
• people have been claiming DuckDuckGo has become just a frontend for Bing which is why their results have been declining 🤷
• ad tech company System1 owns a majority stake of Startpage – apparently they’ve mollified PrivacyTools that it would not impact Startpage’s privacy focused mission
• Qwant out of France actually seems to be stepping up as a good netizen, not only focusing on privacy but also investing in privacy initiatives in EU
• otherwise you’re stuck bouncing around ~~SearX~~ SearXNG instances – Google and Bing REALLY don’t like meta search engines and will regularly block overactive instances

EDIT: looks like SearX is pretty much dead and had been replaced by SearXNG

SearxNg is a meta search engine. You can combine results from Google, Bing and DDG. The most repeated results will be sorted first eliminating the SEO

I don't think you'll find anything. Search engines locate relevant results by design. The only way they can do that is by interpreting the contents of public-facing webpages. There are some things they can do to combat obvious keyword stuffing, but ultimately, overly SEO'd sites are going to work around it with content that appears relevant but really isn't (think recipe websites with 20 paragraphs and pictures of bullshit nobody cares about and the actual content you want to see at the bottom ... that kind of thing).

Kagi is how I search now. Very, very occasionally search for something on Google in specific circumstances, buy otherwise it's all Kagi. Web has become a lot less noisy for me, and they label each search result with how many ads/trackers the site uses. Definitely have found smaller, "quieter" sites that have given me much better info, that hasn't been paid for.

Especially good for tech-review searches.

Kagi, as others mentioned is good but need to pay. Logical. I used to have SearxNG instance but I tend to use search engines in general less and less so no worth to maintain it, currently using DDG or BraveSearch

I use Ecosia which is a reskin of bing that plants trees with your search results. I've never had any issues with low quality results, but maybe we have different ideas of what that means.

https://kagi.com/ if you haven't heard of it. Has been working well for me. I went from DDG to this.

You need to be more specific about what you mean by "SEO garbage" because every search engine is going to put "SEOed" pages higher up.