Qwant/Ecosia.
Used to use Kagi (paid search engine, if you don't know it) which was truly remarkable and well worth its cost, at least in my eyes. But, as a EU citizen, last year US shit show, made me realize I'd better rely less on US-based tech. So...
NoAI DuckDuckGo (noai.duckduckgo.com)
it has decent enough results and disables the unwanted AI features (I don't want to prompt an LLM whenever I search something)
I am willing to switch to something else, right now DDG is good enough.
Kagi. I know it gets trash talked for several reasons, but I've used ecosia, duckduckgo, tried searxng, and now I’m back to Kagi. I just like it better all around.
I'm using paid Kagi subscription, and it makes searching for stuff feel like it used to before Big Tech broke the internet. I can actually find what I'm looking for again.
The "SlopStop" feature is worth it alone, but I love how I can choose what types of results and sources to prioritize.
10/10 Highly recommended.
I've used DDG for the past 7 years or so. When ever I don't find what I'm looking for I just add !g to the search term and it Googles it for me.
DDG works 90% of the time but it does perform worse than Google sometimes
Startpage
Kagi. Well worth the money.
The only independent search engines that support my native Japanese are Google, Bing, Brave, and Yep.
Of these, I generally search using Brave, and if I'm not satisfied with the results, I search again using DuckDuckGo.
I don't use Yep because of its strict bot restrictions.
Also, on the rare occasions when I need to do an exact match or a search using site:, for some reason, Brave and DuckDuckGo are useless, so I reluctantly use Google, which is a shame.
As someone living in Japan, I do not recommend QWant, which is recommended in this comment section.
As I've commented before, this is because the service geoblocks countries that have non-Western languages as their official languages.
DDG is good enough for me.
If I had the money, I would at the very least try Kagi, but for now I'm just surfing with DuckDuckGo using their "noai(dot)duckduckgo(dot)com" link. Auto turns off their dumb "duck ai" nonsense and using their filters to try and hide genAI images.
I also looked it up because I was curious and if the source is correct, I learned that the "noai" part of that link is a subdomain.
I use Qwant and Ecosia.
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.
Edit: I'll add that this doesn't happen very often. The last time I had to do this was maybe a month and some change ago.
searxng (self hosted). But I understand not everyone can host something. There are public instances out there as well.
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.
I use DDG on everything, even the work PC. It works well enough for my purposes. I don’t even hate duck.ai and it can be useful, but I’ll double check anything I take from it.
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.
Duck no AI version
i used to use duckduckgo, still sometimes do. but i switched to qwant and i think i like it better
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)
Kagi for well over a year now
Mostly DuckDuckGo but I do want get kagi at some point. I’ve also been trying searxng self hosted but I want to use it more before I judge it since I probably still need to tweak some settings.
I used ddg and startpage, they are both great. Although I slightly perfer ddg, but stays with startpage because it is european.
I also turn on ads to support them. However, now I have more money but less time to scroll pass all these ads, I switched to kagi, which is ad-free and fast. The price is not cheap and they are not based in Europe (they are registered in the U.S. with employees all over the world, which is technically better than U.S. centric ddg), however there is no alternatives that I am aware of.
I use Qwant. Works great for everything I want it to do. Or ecosia if im on safari.
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.
Ecosia
I'm quite crazy:
Depending on the thing I'm searching for, I have search shortcuts set up. These shortcuts are really handy. It seems much easier to get good results on dedicated search engines for each task, than finding another general purpose search engine that's as good:
Finally, if all else has failed, I use Google (which still unfortunately happens at least a couple of times per day 🙁). Although, reading the posts now, I should switch this stage to DuckDuckGo instead.
I'd quite like to set up my own instance of SearxNG + YaCy at some point. It'd be nice to configure SearxNG to basically do all of these steps at once that I'm doing manually, prioritise my YaCy index, but use other engines to fill in the gaps, and then gradually fill in the gaps in my YaCy index.
Qwant on my computers and DDG on my mobile.
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.
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.
I use Startpage, everything else kind of sucks imo.
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