Right now I am testing Kagi, which is a paid alternative - from a privacy point of view, it looks great, and the results are good. It also has a lot of additional features that suit me well. No Maps integration though. alternatively, I can recommend SearXNG, but it involves a bit of tinkering.

I found some interesting and popular communities here: https://browse.feddit.de/ In my instance (Beehaw) There is also a list of communities that you can follow: https://beehaw.org/communities