'99-2009, the best time for me..some aspects are better now (cheaper, faster, more stable) but search engines are absolute shit now and social media is a stain on society. The never ending need for increasing profits year on year kills everything in the end... It's killed so many good aspects of the net.
Congratulations for killing your own freedoms in the most Western way! I wonder if your virtue signalling gave you any benefit other than strengthening the genocidal Anglo empire's worthless ego.
Been using Yandex as my default search for almost a year now. It's like the old Google and DDG. It doesn't have as many SEO sites like Google results and actually respects when you put quotes around to force include a word in the query making it much more useful for searching up programming errors. The only downside I found is that it has a bunch of anti-degeneracy filters which sometimes interfere if for example if you search up something like "unixporn" it will try and block the word "porn" in the results. Also translate.yandex.com is really good at translating Russian, but seems slightly worse than Google translate for Chinese.
You will need to turn the "safe" filter or whatever it is, if you want to avoid that.
The lesson to be learnt is the country that disrespects "copyright" style BS laws in foreign country will end up being the more free one. And there is only freedom in knowledge and wisdom, not social discourse which is always a bunch of political minigames.