I know you mean well, so have an upvote. It’s true there is a setting in DuckDuckGo to select a region, or to leave it set on “all regions.” Unfortunately, it is functionally useless since I’ve confirmed that it does provide data tailored to my IP. In fact, not just my IP, but the name of my exact county and home town. The HTML fork does not have such a setting, but it was only more subtle about providing location-tailored results. At the end of the day, I can’t rely on it.

Qwant doesn’t have such a setting, but at least it gets as general as “United States” (which would be fair enough for me – like you said, and it’s also occurred to me about searching in English – but searching English terms is also deliberate input from the user and would fall under the category of “keywords and syntax.”) However, Qwant does not simply provide US-based results, but actually targeted toward my exact location. I’m not aware of any setting in which I can change this. If you know of one, please let me know where to find it, because it’s not in the regular settings page.

Kagi is the same as Qwant, but with the addition of an “international” setting. Again, it is non-functional since it persists in providing very specific results to my location. In fact, Kagi is one of the worst I’ve tried so far. It even presents the results in a style reminiscent of Google, including starred reviews and all.

I find it ironic that I avoid toxic algorithms like the plague by not using Facebook or Twitter, yet I am seeing data manipulated by the very search engines I use every day. There’s got to be some obscure old-school search engine out there that works like they did in the 90s, right?