This is what I've been seeing and reading across websites. Lots of tools people are trying out - cloudflare, wordfence, dark visitors/known agents - just to try and defend themselves against this tidal wave of hungry mouths biting everything across their sites. It's frustrating to see.
People who were looking for alternatives to Google as a search engine, you could try Startpage or Qwant. Both are European-based and designed for privacy, and both are offered as default options in the Vivaldi browser (which I switched to and is great so far). Both search engines work just fine.
