"Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?"

There was "rebranded" web search that someone created a number of years ago and posted on HN that aimed to exclude the top websites from results. I cannot remember the name he gave to the project.

One way to exclude the world's biggest websites when using Google is to restrict the search to TLDs other than .com, .net and .org. The root zone is full of silly new TLDs that no one uses for large websites. There are hundreds to choose from.

https://www.google.com/search?q=coronavirus+site:edu

Looks like Google Scholar is including a number of "coronavirus links" on the main page but thankfully not in the results.

https://scholar.google.com

https://scholar.google.com/search?q=coronavirus

Why not skip Google and "web search" and use a database that does not include all the crap one finds on the www

Something like

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov?term=coronavirus

or

https://search.crossref.org/?q=coronavirus