DuckDuckGo: good all-around search engine

Searx: when I’m feeling extra FOSS

Kagi: when I need Google from 10-15 years ago. Has a cool “lenses” feature that let’s you target the type of sites the results come from. (Kagi is one of those rare moments where I use something proprietary because the more open alternatives can’t meet my needs yet.

Kagi for well over a year now

As much as I hate Microslop, I’ve been primarily using Bing because of the whole rewards thing they have. Although, I obviously wouldn’t recommend using it and instead would recommend DuckDuckGo, Ecosia or OceanHero.

For those who haven’t heard of OceanHero, their goal is somewhat similar to Ecosia but they work towards cleaning the Ocean.

duck duck go is like firefox for me. I use it currently but im sorta moving away from it. I don’t really have a good ddg replacement though.

I switched from DuckDuckGo to Waterfox’s paid search engine (https://search.waterfox.com/) because I wanted to send a few dollars per month to a Firefox fork. It uses Google’s search index, so the results are good, and it has no AI-generated responses. I just want a Firefox fork to be financially sustainable, so I’m paying for it. I don’t think it has any advantages over noai.duckduckgo.com, though.

I’ll also check https://marginalia-search.com/ every once in a while, since I like the idea of an independent search engine with their own index. It also has some creative features around discovering small, related websites. Feels like an “early internet” search engine.

https://search.marginalia.nu/ is pretty awesome for getting human generated / small web content.

If I’m looking for people sharing my hyper-fixation https://aboutideasnow.com/ is excellent. https://searchmysite.net/ is a indieweb opti-in only tool with similar usecases but not much is there. Lemmy

https://www.mojeek.com/ I have as my default browser search to try to support as its the only real large index comparable to Google and Bing (DDG uses), but it falls short a lot.

DDG is my primary engine when I need something fast / the others don’t work.

If I can’t find it in the small web and regular search fails, I’ll sometimes try the udm14 Google trick https://udm14.com/

After that its posting to the askfedi hashtag (or ask here)

search.brave.com is pretty good, as is DuckDuckGo. But I’ve lately taken a liking to qwant.com. it’s pretty good and not American.

I use DDG as well. Have for years now, it’s actually gotten to the point where it gives similar if not better results than Google Search for me now.

Qwant on my computers and DDG on my mobile.

DuckDuckGo.

Like others have said, there’s really no getting around that Google has the best search engine from a functional standpoint. So I use DuckDuckGo for my personal reasons, but if I’m dissatisfied with the results, I will open up a “private” browser and do a Google search.

DDG works 90% of the time but it does perform worse than Google sometimes

No ai ddg has been a decent general search engine, but if I can’t find something I’ll us marginalia, mojeek, alltheinternet, and even yandex (if I’m desperate). For your research: InstallGentoo Wiki has a fairly comprehensive list of search engines albeit not the most up to date; Seirdy has a blog post reviewing many search engines including some more niche ones; and The Search Engine Map illustrates which engines use what index.

Brave is decent! I struggles with looking g for smaller local results sometimes. Like you really have to specify the town/cities for small businesses and stuff. Which I suppose is good. That probably means it’s not creeping on your location constantly

I use StartPage, but I keep an eye on Marginalia. It finds sites that other search engines miss.

https://brave.search.com/

• Independent unlike DDG and other
• Parity with google for search results
• Actually good AI integration where it never hallucinates and only summarizes the sources it encounters
• Great integration of wikipedia, stackoverflow etc. into search results
• Great UI