I really like yep.com, as per https://www.searchenginemap.com/ it's one of only four search engines that run their own web crawlers. Results are slow but incredibly high-quality.

You are recommending a search engine that is operating from Russia under one of the most oppressive regimes in the world. The Russian state monitors usage and is definitely censoring all sorts of stuff on it.

Of course Sci Hub was developed by a Russian, which is probably why Yandex is not censoring it. Also, I don't think the Russian government cares much for intellectual property rights of companies in NATO countries, for obvious reasons. But they are definitely censoring a wide range of other topics.

Check this reports for some details on the types of things that Yandex censors: https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/07/30/disrupted-throttled-an...

its crazy that russian search engine is more "open" compared to US search engine

>There are alternative search engines to Google,

..and of those, I really wouldn't be giving the one under the direct control of Russia's FSB as my top recommendation.

A little-known American search engine known as Bing[1] lists Sci-Hub just fine though.

[1] https://www.bing.com/search?q=sci-hub