Most of the public instances I tried stopped working often enough to be annoying. Like if you set one as your browser default and then google blocks it, it's just frustrating.

I've gotten into the habit of just searching directly on specific sites rather than just searching the whole internet - really when you search for things the vast majority of the time you know what site is going to have what you're looking for.

For everything else I've been using bing. The results are fine and chatgpt really is dope. I know they're just as bad for privacy as google but at least it's not google having all my data.