I pay for Kagi. The results are good oob and you can downrank/ban websites.

Duckduckgo for everything.

At first, after the switch years ago, I’d occasionally fallback to Google to search for solutions or explanations of technical errors but I guess Duckduckgo got better and/or Google got worse and I no longer use any other.

A few days ago I tried Qwant briefly with the idea to try to change to non-US services, don’t remember what for, and was not satisfied with the results. I did not try it for long enough to say it’s not a good choice though.

I switched to noai.duckduckgo when startpage went ai. It is a lot better than when I tried duckduckgo in previous years, and definitely better than startpage was. I haven’t noticed any issues with search returns.

Self hosting searxng: https://docs.searxng.org/ I use it for everything. It finds results from multiple search engines, and lists every engine name at the bottom of each link to see where this “recommendation” comes from. You can configure which “engines” it should search. So I use it as my default for everything. The results aren’t always the best and there are times when I then open other search engines directly to see if its any better. But admitteley it is only hosted on my main PC. Currently I cannot access it from other computers, but that is something I plan todo in the future.

If you use Archlinux, then its quite easy as there is a package that always builds from source. Look at my instructions here: https://lemmy.ml/post/45955322

If self hosting isn’t your thing, then you can just use an instance from someone else who made it available in the public: https://searx.space/ It’s also a good way to see how it works before committing to self hosting, if you plan to.

I use qwant mostly

deleted by creator

noai duckduck go

google for porn. brave-search for everything else

Yandex for reverse image search or piracy content

The noai DDG for everything else.

Unfortunately I have notice for the last couple of months that some simple things I can’t just find the answer and the shit AI suggestion baked in the google search is giving me better results and I don’t think that is the AI that got better.

Ultimately duckduckgo is the best.

Bing and Google are out for obvious reasons. Startpage kept asking me to prove I’m human. Qwant blocked me whenever I enabled a VPN with an exit in a region they couldn’t run ads to. Ecosia is a non-profit so I’d feel bad blocking ads, but I don’t want to see ads. Mojeek returned garbage results. Kagi is ridiculously overpriced and restrictive. Brave Search often didn’t return the results I was looking for. And SearXNG I don’t remember what the problem was.

Kagi. Once you try it you’ll never go back.

I use marginalia search and wiby to find “small web” content. Good for finding more human created resources deeply buried in most search indexes.

I was using Brave search for a couple of years for everything and sometimes i was switching to duckduckgo if i couldn’t find what i needed but this was rare. Now i self host SearXNG but this is not an option for an avg user. Brave search is an independent engine and privacy focused.

DDG is my goto, I always have a SearXNG instance, but it’s relatively slow and runs into problems too frequently to be my goto

I use Kagi for personal devices. I wish there was an open source alternative, but there’s not. So I’m stuck.

For work or other devices, I use Qwant.