Web search: how to optimise

I think Rebel’s default is to use DuckDuckGo, which is quite limited, and so the suggestion was to add Brave and then Tavily. It looks like Brave is only available in a free version with a £5 credit each month, which is very quickly used up. How are folks handling this? Can anyone make a recommendation for best practice?

The most powerful is to use the Perplexity MCP, and when you do so, web search defaults to Perplexity going forward.