Kagi has been my go to for a while now.
DDG is among the best in my opinion.

I’m not anti-AI, but I’m against it in everything all the time even when I didn’t want or need it.

It’s called the “annoyance economy”, and it’s profitable especially at scale. A companies obligation is to its investors, not society.
Regulation is the immediate response intended to balance this unless there are other fundamental changes.

Mine was never ever connected to the internet. HDMI is all I needed and wanted. What evil they’re doing now is making you connect it to the internet on first boot.

I’d bet the next step is that it has to be able to phone home at increasingly frequent intervals to allow functionality such as playing content from connected ports.

This is brought to you by the same company that’s developed technology to detect if an hdmi connection is paused so that it can be interrupted to inject ads…