I live in a country which uses a language I don’t speak but Google defaults to regional results in spite of my language being set to English. All other engines give me really poor results (not that Google was giving good ones, the image search has really gone to shit since they started populating it with AI stuff).
I use kagi. It’s pretty nice, though it’s not free.
Third for Kagi, only been using it for a couple of months and I’ve not come across anything that it hasn’t found, or been unhappy with the results it shows.
I’ve been using Kagi for the last year, and when that’s not available, duck duck go or starpage. Kagi is excellent. yes its paid, but imo worth the cost.
By when kagi is not available, do you mean it goes down or you run into quota limits? I’ve been thinking of giving it a go.