Technology

I use DuckDuckGo, I forgot how to live without the search tags such as !yt, !fb, !w to search specific sites.

Unfortunately, still Google, with Bing a distant second. I've realised at least half of my searches are locale-specific, and engines like DDG are so American-centric. This is even with letting DDG use accurate location data. Reading the options here and hoping to find something I've not heard before that'll work and hopefully replace Google as my main search engine.

Startpage, google search results without ads, trackers but much slower, the slowness can get annoying sometimes when my internet speed is bad

I have to shout out Wiby. It is focused on like weird personal websites from the early 2000s, that kind of thing. Absolutely not a general-purpose search engine, but mashing the "surprise me" button will take you to all sorts of fun places.

For general purposes I use Ecosia.

For a while I used Swisscows almost exclusively. They do an excellent job with privacy.

Due to a job I had, I moved away from it as I needed extremely specific information. As I write this, I'm thinking of giving it another try.

In between Brave Search and DDG.

Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I've ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down).

Just simple searches like "Best gaming headphones" or "Realtek Driver Download" and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.

And you can directly define, which sites you'd like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.

Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.

And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.

Lastly, I created a so-called "Lens", which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I've defined - see image.

Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.

(copied from another thread I replied to)

I have switched to Ecosia few days ago. No conplains so far. Its free, and builds off Bing IIRC.

I have been intrigued by Kagi, but Im not really ready to pay a sub for a search engine.

I personally use You.com, Mojeek and Startpage. All of them are great 👍..

I use you.com as it's centered on an ai chatbot and pulls in traditional web search results to augment it's answers. it works quite well.

Honestly? Bing chat has been quite good to me if I have specific questions. It searches the web and gives me a summary.

Duck duck go cause I'm a basic bitch

might not count, but I use startpage, which uses google while allegedly keeping none of the info that makes google problematic
sometimes i use duckduckgo,

in firefox you can make a shortcut to type anything in any searchbar too, like so: (in this example I'll use kbin.social search)

We type something into search to get the exact url we need, that ends up being https://kbin.social/search?q=[something]
in this case [something] is obviously what we typed, so we save a bookmark of https://kbin.social/search?q=%s where %s swaps out what we type when we call to the bookmark
Then we give the bookmark a keyword that makes it easy to type, it can be anything but I'll just use kb
now whenever i type 'kb somethingsomething' it will search somethingsomething on kbin.social

I use this for youtube, arch wiki, the type-effectiveness graph on bulbapedia pages ( https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/%s_(Pok%C3%A9mon)#Type_effectiveness ), etc, etc

My top ones:

DuckDuckGo - may not be as private as they claim, but has been my go-to for years. Simple, but feature-full and still mostly decent for search.

Marginalia - a search engine that favors text heavy websites, perfect for research

Searx instance - not my main due to how spotty the instances can be and lazy to set up mine. But can basically grab stuff from all the "big" search engines, which saves a lot of time. I don't consider it a godsend like most people do, though. As since big engines can give poor results.

frogfind - a duckduckgo interface meant for older computers that converts webpages to basic html. Perfect for news articles and tutorials where you want to skip the "fluff".

Brave Search for the majority of things. Ecosia and sometimes Searx.

Kagi

Kagi.com no ads, private, you pay a subscription so they look for your interest instead of you being the product, has many customizations, very responsive company, very good use of AI, super fast, doesn’t require javascript, and many other things, just give it a try

Brave search works well, but I have the feeling they are playing with user's data otherwise I can't explain their business model