What search engine do you recommend that isn't Google or Bing?
I'm still trying to de-Google my life, little by little. I don't trust Bing for similar reasons. DDG is feeling shady of late. What's the search engine you all recommend that I can inject into my daily life? Is there perhaps a search engine that is focused on code, or have we just all moved on to AI for searching?
Edit: I meant to also express my frustration that most browsers do not let you select a "default search engine" that can be used in the address bar aside from 3-5 pre-chosen engines. Seems like 2023 we should be able to customize that to our own liking.
Edit 2: Thanks for the recommendation of Kagi. I'm going to roll with it for a while. I see they have an extension for Safari that allows them to hijack the address bar, which is just what I needed.
Half a dozen people in here already mentioned it, but Kagi has completely changed the search game and changed the way I use the Internet. It's like an old school search engine with modern conveniences like a chat bot and summarizer, but without the ads and other shenanigans.
I personally enjoy DDG. Their privacy policy for their search is straightforward and there's no evidence that they're not abiding by it. I find it tends to prioritize higher quality blogs and articles ahead of social media results.
I sometime use Brave Search as it seems to do better at giving social media/forum results as they seem to be prioritized higher by it, when I'm looking for more discussion-based content.
Kagi. Nothing else even comes close. Kagi is what Google used to be, before they decided they'll show you whatever is profitable, rather than what they know you're looking for.
I use SearXNG. It is a meta search engine so it use results from various other search engines and you can specify which with !. It does the job for me.
I've been incredibly happy with Kagi. All of the listicles and blogspam get shunted off into their own sections. Kagi also seems to do a pretty good job at finding "deep" results. Like, when I want to find out more information about some home automation gizmo, Kagi does a good job of finding some random blog post where someone has torn the gizmo apart and analyzed every strength and weakness it has. I still prefer Google for looking up restaurants and stuff, but I hardly use it anymore. I don't at all regret the $10 a month I pay to use Kagi.
Edit: I also like that Kagi lets you define rules. Occasionally I'll be forced to go to Reddit to get some information (I really try to go elsewhere first). I deleted my account, so I go to new Reddit by default (which I hate). I don't want to add an extension to redirect to old Reddit, but I can just replace the www with old automagically for all Reddit search results. Works great.
The best I've found is Mojeek. The results take some getting used to because we're all used to Google's fuckery, but I've been using it for months, and it's quite good.
There's also SearXNG, though I'm not sure if that fits your needs. A couple public instances I've liked are:
Better version of SearX. A list of SearX and SearXNG instances is available at https://searx.space
Also meta search engines, but different:
DuckDuckGo
It's very privacy friendly, but it gets all the search results from Microsoft's Bing.
Startpage
Basically the same thing but it uses Google results. They are really focused on privacy too, they even are on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@StartpageSearch
They're based in the EU (Netherlands) so they are also subject to the GDPR.
Independent:
Brave Search
They recently stopped using Google and Bing and created their own search index. It appears to be privacy friendly, but the company behind Brave is not ideal.
I've seen many many people recommend it, but I have never really used it myself. It's not free, they charge $5/month for 300 searches and $10 for unlimited searches.
Been using Qwant for maybe a year or so. Recently found Swisscows too. I am not sure if Qwant uses their own index. I remember that they said that they were to create their own index, but the results looks suspiciously similar to Bing. Swisscows for sure runs their own index, and I find the results to be rather good
Edit: I meant to also express my frustration that most browsers do not let you select a “default search engine” that can be used in the address bar aside from 3-5 pre-chosen engines. Seems like 2023 we should be able to customize that to our own liking.
Which browsers don't? I think this one can likely be chalked up to user error.
Another option is SearXNG. It's meta search engine, which means that it aggregates other search engines like Google and Bing but without tracking or logging, because your searches are proxied using a public instance, that will mix your search with the ones from other people.
And about default search engine, don't know what you're talking about, both chrome and Firefox allows this, in mobile and desktop.
I like startpage.com. It doesn’t save your searches and I feel like it gives better results than DDG. Also it’s been around for awhile - it used to be ixquick
startpage is alright if u want a quick alternative.
but definitely look into searx. it can be annoying to choose an instance (unless you self host!), but it can be a lot more customizable and decentralized
I used to be a part of the DuckDuckGo hype train until I found out they did actually track data (not an issue to me personally, but it betrayed their key marketing point), as used to be demonstrable if you had a slow internet and hovered your cursor over a link (it would show the tracking data loading). It was the one thing separating them from Ecosia, and I decided to join the Ecosia hype train, even if their own promises are themselves highly exaggerated. Every effort to do what Ecosia promises, even failed efforts, are appreciable.
I've been using qwant for a few weeks and it gives me quite satisfying and accurate results.
Before I had been using ecosia for years but the results can be lackluster sometimes. Especially when you search very specific "niche" things (like obscure Linux problems troubleshooting).
But I'm still looking for a browser which let's you pick multiple languages for results.
You can absolutely configure the default search engine on your browser to a custom one in some cases. I use startpage and it isn’t in the default options, but it can be added.
I use startpage.com on desktop. They provide Google results (sort of like DDG uses Bing results) so it’s not some autonomous magic privacy thing but it’s what I want from a search engine.