I host SearXNG on my home server, and I configured it to provide better results than Google.
I tried Kagi. It's nice, but the price is a bit high for a search engine.
Altavista circa 1999. Google stole the crown and was good for a long while after that, but it's intentionally worse now than Altavista was back then.
If someone like DuckDuckGo could get their heads out of their cloacas long enough to fix the + and - features for "must contain" and "must not contain", they could easily steal that crown.
I can't tell if I genuinely agree or if it's the nostalgia goggles doing the thinking.
Kagi in my experience is the best, but $$
Brave is a close second, but crypto bro
SearXNG is great, but only if you self host to avoid throttling
Most of the rest use Bing under the hood so they're all about the same
Kagi is worth every penny. Superb results.
10€/mo for unlimited searches is a bit too high. They could lower the price by selling the AI features under an additional subscription.
That's way too much for a search engine for personal use IMO
Do you need unlimited searches? You get 300 searches a month for $5.
Plus it's 10% off if you pay annually.
Fair enough; I respect that. But I’d pay twice as much if they asked, because I value it so much. Not just the results, but the dedication to keeping the results uncluttered without forcing advertising or selling my eyes to advertisers. I dig it.
Like sending Wikimedia money every time they ask; worth it.
They have a plan for $25 if you want to pay them twice as much 😋
I mean I certainly wouldn't mind paying less, but it is something I use every day, I get way more value out of my Kagi subscription than literally any other subscription I have except maybe Home Assistant.
I haven't tried it so I can't speak to the value proposition but Uruky is the new competition, weighing in at half the price: https://uruky.com/
I have tried Uruky, it is nowhere near as polished or good as Kagi, but at least it is european.
If the search index gets better, I could consider it. But at the moment the european search engines and the european search index it uses are not good enough for daily use, at least for me.
I find myself going back and fourth between Qwant and DDG
These aren't what I would call 'best,' just supplemental when the best isn't cutting it.
Marginalia is pretty decent. I like that it lets you specifically search forums, wikis, blogs, or academia.
https://wiby.me/ is good for exploring old-school sites. This is more of an answer to "how do I 'surf the web' in 2026?" than what you're probably asking for. (The search itself is very keyword-y with no attempt to guess at relevance.)
I'd join the others here recommending Kagi if you can stomach the price. I've tried quite a few over the years but have now been on Kagi for over 2 years and can't really see myself going back. Nothing I've tried comes close. And this is coming from someone that hates subscriptions and self host pretty much everything.
Used to use Brave, but I read some shady stuff and hate the crypto. I've switched to Startpage, as far as I know they're doing good and gets the job done for me.
SearxNG is the only way I know of to get reasonably good results.
Qwant
Kagi if you're rich, a combo of DDG and https://searxng.website/ if you're poor.
Rich?! It’s $5/mo…
I still can't afford that, many people can't.
Another subscription. $5 a month is fairly pricey anyway, considering how often you would probably need to use it.
You’re forgetting that if you use a “free” service you’re paying with your personal data. That’s a helluva lot more expensive than $5.
But you can't convert those 2 units
So, that means you should simply shrug and let your data be sold?
Depends on what you are searching. DuckDuckGo can be great, if you can use the shortcuts that search directly on other Sites.
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