I do run Safari and it's always worked quite well for me (and even better now under Mojave).
Where search engines are concerned, I dumped Google several months ago. People were properly pissed off at Facebook over the way it handled user data and privacy, but they're pikers compared to the blood-thirsty bandits at Google. They have enough private data on even non-computer users to give even a corpse the shivers!
I've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, and I'm very pleased with it. The parent company doesn't track its users or keep data on them. (They have a completely different business model from Google, so their revenue stream isn't even remotely dependent on user data or the sale thereof.)
I heartily recommend it and hope other people will take it for a spin to see how they like it!