DuckDuckGo on Firefox. If you truly want to de-google your life avoid Chrome and Chromium based browsers like Edge and Brave
I just make a post in NoStupidQuestions and use y'all like a search engine. :P
Posting a wrong answer is a good way to get the right answer in a reply!
Ah, Murphy's law
You're thinking of Godwin's Law
Got 'em
Almost got me!
I'm out of the loop on DDG, what did they do?
[Edited by the commenter to remove incorrect information, see below.] I'm not sure if anything else has come up since then though, and I've continued using DDG, just not for any sort of news or information on current events. I mainly use a search engine for dev stuff anyways.
Do you have a source for that?
https://kagi.com no ads, great results. It’s $5 a month but worth it imo
Seconding. Kagi is the only one that was able to replace Google for me.
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.
Ugh, paid. In this economy!?
I know, that was my reaction at first too. But I tried it for a month and honestly it's an amazing search engine. If it helps you to know, when you search they also use the (paid) search APIs of other search engines and aggregate the results in a way to get something better than any individual engine - so your searches actually have a decent marginal cost for them.
$5/month. Worth it.
except it's not for me... I search way, way more than 300/month and $10/m honestly sounds a little unreasonable for a search engine.
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.
Firefox allowed you to define the default search and have many many engines listed. That's been a standard feature for many years.
even simpler – Firefox will auto-detect a lot of search engines – right-click in the search/address bar and if Firefox can detect it, bottom option will be to add that engine to your list
I'm pretty sure most browsers can. Pretty sure OP's complaint's a big misplaced on that one.
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.
Not sure I'm ready to pay for search especially not at $5-10/mo.
If you're not spending some money then you're not the customer, you're the product. Would you really prefer the web continue to be supported by ads and people who sell data about you?
Yep. Like $1.99 or $2.99 I can easily justify but $5/mo for only 300 searches feels too steep to me reguardless of result quality. I'll just go through the other pages of results from any other search engine.
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.
Kagi is by far the best search engine I've ever used. It is paid though.
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.
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:
Random SearX Redirector – basically just that, sends your search to a random working SearXNG instance
Duckduckgo and (downvotes incoming) brave search.
And I disagree with you, I don't know a single browser where you can't change the default search engine.
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 owned by a advertising company and is propriatary as fuck
Oh wow that happened 4 years ago?! Time to find a new one..
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
Kagi is the best around if you are willing to pay. If I had to cancel my subscription for whatever reason, I would go back to DDG.
Meta search engines:
-
SearX
Open source, self hostable meta search engine.
-
SearXNG
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.
-
Mojeek
A small privacy focused search engine, that uses its own index. They're also on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@Mojeek
-
Kagi
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.
Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu