If you can live without personalisation there are plenty of alternatives. : 12 privacy engines reviewed.

Good article. Reviews search engines with pretty good privacy. Details where most get their results from.

How to Guide To Using Reverse Image Search For Investigations - bellingcat

What came before Google? This article answers that question. Fairly comprehensive.

A comprehensive overview of the history of search engine technology companies. Read about search's origin in 1945 and innovation through today.

Back in 2001 we still had a lot of search engines, here is a list. See what we have lost.

Crawshaw 2018-5-18 Article about how search results have become dominated by Brands and commercial interests.

A page, long forgotten on a university server. This is a guide created in 1997 about how to search the web. Listing resources. Nice bit of early Web 1.0 history.