Which search engine do you use for what? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 days ago by FreddiesLantern@leminal.space to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Someone (average smartphone user) complained to me the other day that there isn't a clear solution to navigating the web because it's either ai slop or the results are poor.

And I kinda agree, nowadays you do have to put in some more effort to get what you're looking for.

And so I told them I'd compile a list of which search engines are best for what purpose.

So far I have:

Startpage: works, but does a poor job of finding product codes and whatnot.

Duckduckgo: gives more general results afaik

Ecosia: works great but relies on bing

I have tried things like qwant ect but haven't really settled on those.

Any other suggestions?

I'd tell em to use udm14 but it's still google so I'd rather keep that as a plan B.

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[-] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026

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