Technology

Sadly, I use Google. Their query syntax is so good and can be so precise in their results. I wish to get any search engine with that quality in their query syntax.

Brave search. When I don't find something I try with google.

Most of the time brave search is good enough. But everyone searches for different things so idk.

I'll be that weird guy using Bing! Ive signed up for Bing Rewards so I at least get some payment for the data they're collecting. Also the Bing ChatGPT feature is interesting and useful at times.

I have been using brave search for a few weeks, and the results seem pretty good so far.

I use Duckkduckgo, I'd like to use Kagi though, From my short experience, the results were excellent and I'd like to curate the websites I like and don't more as I think that would improve things the results even more.

I use duckduckgo. One thing I notice about the google language is that my phone has french as the os language so google will be in french but then I go to a computer that has english as it's language, sign in and google will be in french (even though my account is set to english). So check your OS and browser language settings on all devices you signed in on.

I'm a developer and I've been trying out www.phind.com, has been decent so far. It gives you both a chatGPT/AI answer and a regular search engine result at the same time. Just don't rely on it to write an accurate RegEx...

When I setup a new browser, I always delete all the default search engines and install DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant and Startpage. If I'm looking for accurate results, I always use 2 or 3 of these. I can't say I consistently get better results using one or the other.

StartPage or DDG

Been very happy with DuckDuckGo for a while now.

Ecosia and DuckDuckGo

I use Startpage, a privacy focused search engine which uses Google powerful search engine but without sending the actual data to them. The result are pretty good. You can change both the language and region in the settings. Bad part of Startpage is it is a for profit company (some advertising will be displayed using past search history only)

Brave search. The results have been better for me than most of the major players, summarizer comes in handy, and the discussions section showing forum posts on the searched for topic + top comment is useful. No native image section, but I work around that by !s bang to search on startpage when I need images. And yes, it has bangs, just like DDG.

I rotate between a handful of public SearX/SearXNG instances. I used to use Duckduckgo but after learning about the deal they had with Microsoft I completely stopped trusting them.

I tried you.com for a long period of time. It has some nice ways to present content but overall I too often did not find what I was looking for so I switched back to startpage.com as unpersonalized version of Google.

Results are very hit-and-miss, but if you're into the whole distributed search engine thing you should give Yacy a try. https://yacy.net/ I ran a node for a long time and as long as you keep feeding the index you usually get decent results for the things you search for often.

I use DDG pretty exclusively. I've never had issues with it, I set it as default and didn't think about it after that

I use Bing now due to Microsoft Rewards and Bing AI

I use ddg most of the time. It fits all my needs. Sometimes when it comes to very niche things or complicated things I use startpage or brave.

I decided to try to commit to Brave since it's the sole one to use open maps while DDG uses Apple.

Startpage primarily because I was told that the Google results are better than DuckDuckGo but I never noticed any big difference except that Startpage has deactivated NSFW content by default. DuckDuckGo feels a little bit snappier and less cluttered tho.

I was using Brave until last month. They did something and now image search redirects to Google/Bing so might as well use Google I guess...

Oh and also the normal search results got really bad all of a sudden.

I'm still sticking with google. I check duckduckgo occasionally but always find it to be subpar.

Ecosia. It's not a great search engine, but it's good enough most of the time, and it plants trees.

It doesn't necessarily return the results I want, though. Possibly because it isn't tailored to me like Google is (thanks, data-scraping!) so sometimes I use Google if I want a search engine to use context.

For example, I couldn't remember the name of the show 'Voltron'. If I search Ecosia for 'cartoon show giant robots made of smaller robots' then I get pictures, or snippets of the phrase 'giant robot' or 'show giant' or whatever, literally looking for it. But then I swap to Google and it uses context to show me Voltron stuff among the results so I can be like YEAH THAT'S IT NOW I can make my extremely topical joke to my friend, thanks

I hear good thinks about Duck Duck Go, it may even use Google's search indexing but it protects your privacy and doesn't track what you're searching. Which is both 'bad' (your results are harder to narrow down obscure searches) and good (general searches aren't contaminated by obscure guesses).

Selfhosted SearxNG with Google and duckduckgo

Struggling a lot with this lately.

Had been using DDG for years without any problems, but it became unusably bad for me a while ago. Tried Qwant and Startpage, which were an improvement, though not great, then began to struggle with them also.

Briefly had a good time with some Searx instances, but must be doing something badly wrong (or am developing early onset dementia, hahaha) as can no longer get it to work well either.

In short, I can get up Wikipedia entries & usually major websites providing I use a single search term, but can seldom get more complex searches to work no matter what operands I use.

Hoping to find something that suits, as it is quite frustrating.

Searx. https://xo.wtf