A search engine is where you actually do the searching (ex. google.com)
Your search engine gathers alot of data about you every time you search, What you search, where you are searching from, what links you click, and it sells all this information.
The major search engine most people use is google, but you should avoid using google as in recent years it promotes misinformation and ads over what you are searching for.
Instead
Use a search engine like duckduckgo or brave search. Or (my recomendation) A METAsearch engine that combines the results of multiple websites and search engines. Such as: Startpage, ecosia, Quant