I’m approaching 30 but I started using Merlin a few years ago and have evolved into a casual bird nerd since.

Sounds like Hyrum’s Law.

From Wikipedia:

There has long been a popular belief that this was a deliberate feature of the design, to assemble aluminium aircraft without overtightening the fasteners. There is no good evidence for this suggestion, and the property is not mentioned in the original patents.

Sure, I also like ReBang

Yeah, I use it as a fallback sometimes. The one thing I like about Presearch is that it has a customizable sidebar that let’s you duplicate your search on another engine with one click if the results are shite. I also use Allsearch to that end but with Presearch it’s synced across computers through my account.

I use Presearch and generally the results are good enough for my use. Just block the ads and ignore the crypto scam. Seirdy also has a pretty exhaustive list of search engines to choose from.