I haven't used it (or their browser Orion, which is allegedly better-performing and more battery-efficient than Safari), but have you tried the "premium" search engine called https://kagi.com/ ?

Kagi with lenses is tremendous. I recommend it elsewhere in this thread.

One should subscribe to it out of support, hope, and to send a signal if nothing else. But it’s actually considerably better on most searches, perhaps similar to a mid-2000s Google, except with mild structure added that isn’t ads.

(You can still !g like ddg if you feel you absolutely must.)

Imagine websites having a captcha, that proofs that they are handcrafted by a person, proofing the time invested, the back and forth. You could filter for that.

Are you a GPT-3?

This actually seems a reasonable enough solution to the bot problem, but doesn’t address the fake content problem. A human can still upload fake stuff.

Not, if the whole creation process has been documented with a sort of internal blockchain.. From scan sketch, to open canvas, to every single brush, to convert image to upload image. You can fake that too, but the effort would be tremendous