I have a lot of search shortcuts configured in Firefox, and find vertical search is a good way of avoiding google.

• Wikipedia, Wikidata: for factual things, finding links to homepages of brands or well-known venues, macros of ingredients.
• Wiktionary: for definitions.
• OpenStreetMap: for physical locations, to get opening hours or websites of physical shops.
• OpenStreetMap Wiki, PostmarketOS Wiki, Debian Wiki, Guile Mailing List Archives: if you can find a wiki, forum or mailing list dedicated to your special interest, then searching these directly can be pretty good.
• Lemmy: for recommendations, general opinions, looking for negative opinions about services before I try them.
• Podcast Index: I used to use Apple Podcast's website to find the canonical RSS feed for a podcast, but someone on Lemmy pointed me to this website, which is more independent.
• Marginalia: for recipes, especially with the no javascript filter enabled, just by typing in the names of some ingredients I want to use, I'll find all sorts of weird and wonderful webpages with nice recipes on.
• Repology: to look for software packages.

And then, for general searches, I normally start off with Marginalia, followed by SearXNG, followed by DuckDuckGo if desperate.

Duck duck go for personal, Bing and Google for work.

Duck duck go isn't bad, I can usually find what I need from them.

Lots of AI platforms use Brave search and lots of people use AI instead of search engines now, if your looking for something else you can try that.

I'm waiting for a real European search engine that is also digitally sovereign i.e uses its own index. The EU funded one sub index but it was promptly ignored by every single european bing frontend (Ecosia, qwant, startpage, etc.). Why, I don't know.

Until then, the only search engine that seems to be doing any good with ad money is Ecosia.

I use various SearXing instances. Some are better than others though. I will probably end up hosting my own eventually

I always use DuckDuckGo. It's usually adequate, and certainly "the best of a bad lot", if you want to look at it that way. I sometimes use bangs if I want to search directly on a site. For example, sometimes I'll search for something like a code tutorial video directly from DuckDuckGo, and if I have trouble finding it, I'll update my search to go directly to YouTube, e.g., "modern perl features" first, then "modern perl features !yt".

I used to jump over to Google when I couldn't find something through DuckDuckGo, but it's such garbage now, I don't even try. I haven't used Google for months.

Just get a Kagi subscription and be done with it. I don't have time to deal with the bs of free services.

I use xPrivo, base in Luxembourgh.

It uses the EU made Index from Ecosia and Qwant and own.

Uruky I've been using them for a few months, this interview is what made me switch. It's a small team of 2 people (a guy and his wife), they have a handful of search indexes (EUSP, Linkup, Serper, Marginalia, Mojeek, PriEco, Mwmbl), and you can customize which of them you want to use.

I use EUSP index and I have to say it's pretty good, it finds MOST things i'm looking for and when it doesn't, at the bottom of the page there's "Try with Linkup / Serper / Mojeek / Marginalia" so you can click around and see if the other indexes match something that your main one missed. And at the top there's "Try in Ecosia / Google / DuckduckGo" (I sometimes use DDG and Ecosia).

In the settings there's lots of customization options for the UI.

They've been clear they won't include AI at all in this search engine.

You can pay with crypto, cash or card.

They are EU-based (EU servers, EU storage, EU payment processing, EU search providers) (Mojeek is based in UK, but whatever).

They have bangs and you can enable DDG / Kagi bangs.

You can create your own web fallback engines (like they have ddg/ ecosia/ google) by default.

You're not required to give out your personal details when registering, you literally only get an account number.

5 eur / month.

Yeah idk I just like it. It's minimal and does what I need, they've been adding new features and it feels good supporting big tech independent search indexes, services.

A year or two back when I tried independent search indexes they were all pretty bad and I concluded you can't really avoid using Bing / Google indexes. But now? EUSP is veeery decent and in combination with the other, smaller ones they cover a lot of ground. I would say it's in the same tier as Bing, but slightly worse than Google. But for 90% of the searches ? It's good enough and you can always just use Ecosia when you need Google or Serper index (directly in Uruky).

I see people mention Kagi.

I used Kagi for 3 months when they gave me a free trial maybe a year back. It's a good product and probably the best search engine out there. However, it's also more expensive than Uruky (10$/ month) and more importantly they use Yandex as one of their search indexes.. They've also removed all mentions of this fact from their help pages. They also use brave index. You can't choose to not use them and in general they havent been very transparent about the whole thing (as to how much they use each index)

By the way Ecosia relies on Google, not bing. They've switched quite a long time ago.

I like duckduckgo. I use a self hosted searxng mostly because I think it's neat. I actually like ddg better, but I still use searxng cause I like selp hosting stuff.

Kagi for everything, Google for the rare case in trying to find a product to buy locally and can’t.

I use a selfhosted OmniSearch instance. It's a metasearch provider, supplying links from ddg, mojeek, startpage and yahoo.

It's fine. It's mega private and has no built in AI tools, which is what I care most about.

The creator has requested that their code not be mirrored to any proprietary platforms. It is availible at https://git.bwaaa.monster/

Simple to configure and if you desire to rebrand or restyle it, it's as simple as changing the HTML and CSS.