Currently, I prefer the Kagi model as my daily driver – pay a small fee each month and not worry about having your search data, in all its forms, sold instead. They have some neat features, as well, like AI summaries and the ability to ask questions about pages. It’s those two features I have used to determine what kind of content, even musical, may be on the page for me without having to go to the page, itself.
There is also SearXNG, which is an open source, privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine. It can be self-hosted and also has a number of instances you can access.
Worked for a newspaper for many years. This is a great question.
Good headlines are both intended to give reasonable summaries and drive readers toward articles they’d like to read, because newspapers – and news media congregation systems in general – don’t have a true table of contents, only a series of categories under which article types live. Headlines, at a glance, function as a table of contents in newsprint formats because of this: you can scan for what you find interesting, but don’t have to intake the whole newspaper page to understand what’s being reported.
App scrolling through headlines, then, is functionally the same thing. Just a different UX, is all.