Normally I find what I search for

I use duckduckgo for every of my web searching needs. 85% of the times I get relevant or somewhat relevant results. The rest... well, I acknowledge that I may search for super nieche things and move on.

Only thing I don't kinda like in duckduckgo though is that the result list may change if I navigate to somewhere and go back, but I can live with it.

Mostly DDG when I can. It's terrible with Slovene searches, so I occasionally still have to use google.

Also, our local najdi.si is just stupid.

I pay for Kagi. The results are good oob and you can downrank/ban websites.

I pay for Kagi and use it for everything. Very happy with the service.

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.

Kagi. Not cheap but I seriously cant go back. Its really good for what I need - actual results at the top of the first page, based purely on what I searched for. What a concept. My needs are basic to be clear.

Running all my queries through SearXNG in normal windows and DuckDuckGo in private ones.

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ is a decent way of avoiding some ai generated junk.

I often add the word "forum" to my searches to help get some actual human discussion instead of ad farming AI slop articles. Seems like the only way to figure things out these days.

Well, at risk of downvotes...

I know what your asking but tbh I generally don't search, at least not like we used to. It's weird to say that, like I'm making some claim to heightened purity or some bullshit but it's not that at all. Search is just ... noisy AF these days.

I actually find myself using fewer sources, more directly and own my terms.

Eg: For something like PubMed, I go to pubmed (or define a proper boolean PICO search in an indexing tool). Sci-hub is a good source too.

https://sci-hub.st/

Or I can hit the wikipedia API (or even better, self hosted kiwix) and find what I need.

https://kiwix.org/en/

Or, for known, commonly visited sites (like fan wikis), I use self-written tools.

There are plenty of sites have public facing, nicely formatted, JSON friendly results. Others are just clean to scrape. A recent discovery was Muvitimes (for getting movie times listings).

https://muvitimes.com/

These tools query my white listed sites to a particular depth, collect the results I need, and present them for review.

You can then cache the info locally to query against using something like Meilisearch.

https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch

There are other options too. Something like Scrapy can collect structured data and a Trafilatura-like extractor can remove menus, adverts, and repeated page content.

https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy

I've even use something like self hosted Perplexica. It can query SearXNG, Tavily, Exa or other sources.

https://github.com/kiranz/perplexica

Honestly, if it's a quick throw away search, I'll call my self hosted llm, get it to pull from Tavilly and give me the summary and citations. That's been miles better than most other options for me but YMMV.

Finally, if you're talking about random occasional searches on phone, when I can't access my LAN, I don't mind DDG-lite

https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite

Selfhosted SearXNG for everything.

I've been using degoog.org for a few months and frankly the experience has been flawless. I'm thinking of self-hosting it.

https://github.com/degoog-org/degoog

I used DuckDuckGo in the past, it's pretty nice but it's proprietary and the company is a little bit too much pro-AI. They made a poll about AI approval and despite the majority of people were against, they kept it on their regular website and launched DDG No-AI instead.

Now I've moved to SearchXNG (https://searx.ononoki.org/), and it's very good but the Bing search engine has a weird bug where doesn't give relevant results. You can fix this by using DuckDuckGo and Brave engines instead.

Duckduckgo for everything.

At first, after the switch years ago, I'd occasionally fallback to Google to search for solutions or explanations of technical errors but I guess Duckduckgo got better and/or Google got worse and I no longer use any other.

A few days ago I tried Qwant briefly with the idea to try to change to non-US services, don't remember what for, and was not satisfied with the results. I did not try it for long enough to say it's not a good choice though.

I'm a software engineer so I search quite a lot.

99% of my search is on duckduckgo and it provides me the best answers. Even if I'm using someone else's device to show them something for example, and their default search engine is google, I will switch to ddg because it genuinely provides better answers.

I switched to noai.duckduckgo when startpage went ai. It is a lot better than when I tried duckduckgo in previous years, and definitely better than startpage was. I haven't noticed any issues with search returns.

google for porn. brave-search for everything else

noai duckduck go

Iirc ecosia uses google and Startpage is the same. I generally just use ddg unless I can't find something, then I try Startpage

DuckDuckGo is said to cooperate with Google. Brave Search doesn't give me confidence because the browser has had many privacy violation scandals in its code. StartPage is proprietary, but has good privacy laws, since its origin is from the Netherlands, although the service has been down very frequently lately. I think the best is without a doubt SearX my dear friend. Link: https://metasearx.com/info/en/about

Self hosting searxng: https://docs.searxng.org/ I use it for everything. It finds results from multiple search engines, and lists every engine name at the bottom of each link to see where this "recommendation" comes from. You can configure which "engines" it should search. So I use it as my default for everything. The results aren't always the best and there are times when I then open other search engines directly to see if its any better. But admitteley it is only hosted on my main PC. Currently I cannot access it from other computers, but that is something I plan todo in the future.

If you use Archlinux, then its quite easy as there is a package that always builds from source. Look at my instructions here: https://lemmy.ml/post/45955322

If self hosting isn't your thing, then you can just use an instance from someone else who made it available in the public: https://searx.space/ It's also a good way to see how it works before committing to self hosting, if you plan to.

I use qwant mostly

Brave search (and Mojeek,Yandex,Mwmbl through SearXNG) for most stuff and Start page as a final resort.

DDG is my goto, I always have a SearXNG instance, but it's relatively slow and runs into problems too frequently to be my goto

Kagi.

Yandex for reverse image search or piracy content

The noai DDG for everything else.

Unfortunately I have notice for the last couple of months that some simple things I can't just find the answer and the shit AI suggestion baked in the google search is giving me better results and I don't think that is the AI that got better.

Qwant off of Orion on iOS. Don't bother with Kagi. There are better options if they switch to graphene.

EDIT: SearXNG is perfect in every way except for consistently returning useful search results.

I was using Brave search for a couple of years for everything and sometimes i was switching to duckduckgo if i couldn’t find what i needed but this was rare. Now i self host SearXNG but this is not an option for an avg user. Brave search is an independent engine and privacy focused.

Kagi. Once you try it you'll never go back.

I use marginalia search and wiby to find "small web" content. Good for finding more human created resources deeply buried in most search indexes.