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

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.

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

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.

noai duckduck go

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.

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.

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 Exa 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

I use qwant mostly

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.

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

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

Selfhosted SearXNG for everything.

google for porn. brave-search for everything else

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

Kagi.

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.

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 use Kagi for personal devices. I wish there was an open source alternative, but there's not. So I'm stuck.

For work or other devices, I use Qwant.

Ecosia

Works very well for everyday stuff, been using it for almost 2 years now, though it does take a bit to get used to it because it gives you slightly different results for the same search queries

It's not worse, it just interprets your queries slightly differently

The only time it consistently fails and I switch to google is when I need to look up something via popular references, typically text on memes, for which Ecosia instead tends to return serious/factual results instead of the funny I was looking for

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.

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

I selfhost searxng ¯\(ツ)/¯

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

I use Qwant as my daily mostly because it's European and I can turn of AI.

I have been using Brave Search for a couple of years and have been very satisfied with the results. It uses its own index instead of relying on Bing or Google like most search engines. The summaries are also one of the few cases that I have found AI to be useful for some more obscure questions.

The image results are very poor though, so I still use DuckDuckGo for that.

DDG for everything but especially searches in other countries (using the country toggle).

Google for images and super localized results.

Yandex for reverse image search (yes really).

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.

Normally I find what I search for

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

Someone posted this neosearch thing recently that I've enjoyed :

https://neosearch.org/

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.