What search engine should I use?

I use DDG but I'm always open to alternatives.

All of them at once: SearXNG.

It aggregates results from whichever you select.

Been using Qwant for the last 2-3 months and been pretty happy with the results

qwant.com/

Find a variant of Searx you like.

I use and recommend Qwant or DuckDuckGo

I have used brave search which was really good I really liked the ai search although i moved away from it after seeing how bad google ai search was (saying things like its a good idea to eat rocks due to not being able to recognise satire) and I managed to get brave to do the same thing with a different onion article so i dont really trust any ai search now. At the moment I use searx it's incredibly private especially if you are willing to self host (I am not) and you have so much customisation you can use any search index so you don't have to worry about bad results.

Qwant also seams really good although I haven't tried it, same with ecosia especially if you like planting trees although I use an ad blocker so that doesn't work for me.

Imo there are so many great free browsers it's not really worth paying for a browser.

I also don't recommend duck duck since it used to have a tracking deal with Microsoft. It doesn't have it anymore but I think it's enough to lose faith in it.

Google without logging in with ublock is best. No privacy implication, no ads, no ai response.

I use duckduckgo. It is Bing but with more privacy. You could try also searx, swisscows, startpage or qwant

SearXNG: https://github.com/searxng/searxng

It enhances and respects privacy,
is open source and self hostable,
and queries multiple configurable search engines (google, bing, brave, duckduckgo, ...)

You can find a list of public hosted instances here:
https://searx.space/

However I prefer to slap an instance randomizer on top, so each of my queries goes through another public SearXNG instance, for more privacy, and mostly, to bypass rate-limiting after frequent queries.

For this I use:

• On Desktop - GimmeASearX:
  https://github.com/demostanis/gimmeasearx
• On the go - SearX NeoCities:
  https://searx.neocities.org/

This is probably the best resource for keeping track of which search engine options exist and what their quality is like: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes

For a "fire and forget" option that doesnt require any configuration you cant go wrong with good ol DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com

If you're okay with dealing with more configuration and breakage then Searx can be pretty powerful as its a metasearch engine that can search with every search engine you tell it at once and agregate the results(while proxying things to maintain privacy): https://searx.space (had decent luck with the https://search.sapti.me instance if you just wanna try it out without searching through a list of options)

Also all search engines are kinda bad due to SEO spam and "AI" generated images and articles polluting the results, consider using uBlacklist to help you filter out the trash from search results(think of it like ublock origin for search engine results), can use it for basically any search engine so no reason to not set it up: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

I self host my own SearXNG instance. I use that.

Anyone of the many SearXNG instances is your best choice for balancing privacy and quality results. It's open source, sources multiple search engines which you can control, is anonymous, and provides solid results. Here's a list of active SearXNG instances: https://searx.space/

I also use DuckDuckGo. If I find I’m not seeing the results I want i just add !g anywhere and the search gets sent over to Google, though I don’t find I need to do that very often.

I use Brave Search (yeah from the browser) and it works pretty good. Their privacy policy seems fairly robust at least according to my understanding and they have their own index, so they don't rely on Google or Bing, which allows them to filter out the SEO Spam rampant on other engines.

I am paying for Kagi. Has worked well and some searched topics had been human curated so the answers are right there in the results. But it also does a good job with obscure searches, although it seems it tries to alter the meaning or context in order to show more results.

Best feature is the ability to hide from the results shit sites like Reddit or Quora.

Start Page. Google results without the Google.

Or duckduckgo

Duckduckgo is the best one, you can also use Startpage andWoogle

I've been using Ecosia, it's basically Google results, but with more privacy, and they invest the revenue in tree-planting projects.

https://www.ecosia.org/

nogoo.me

DuckDuckGo

I've really been enjoying Kagi. They seem to have a pretty good privacy policy as well. However Searxng is probably the best for privacy since it's self hosted.

I use Bing because it gives points at ~$120/yr sent to the FSF. I asked FSF and they validated that they get what MSFT says they send.

Regarding more privacy-based search engines, I perceive the privacy argument from corporate search as marketing. Any corporate search engine should be selling your data to maximize profit, even if you pay monthly.

4get.ca lets you select your scraper among pretty much everything else listed here, and it can be themed with my preferred color scheme right out of the box, so it gets my vote.

Stop using search engines and start using ai. Especially ai that links to sources is much better than weeding out the heavily influenced search results. Using ai is like opening 10 search results finding the relevant sources and comparing them all to bother the information down to a digestible nugget.