Technology

I hop between Brave search, Startpage and DuckDuckGo depending on the results I get.

Ecosia. It's not a great search engine, but it's good enough most of the time, and it plants trees.

It doesn't necessarily return the results I want, though. Possibly because it isn't tailored to me like Google is (thanks, data-scraping!) so sometimes I use Google if I want a search engine to use context.

For example, I couldn't remember the name of the show 'Voltron'. If I search Ecosia for 'cartoon show giant robots made of smaller robots' then I get pictures, or snippets of the phrase 'giant robot' or 'show giant' or whatever, literally looking for it. But then I swap to Google and it uses context to show me Voltron stuff among the results so I can be like YEAH THAT'S IT NOW I can make my extremely topical joke to my friend, thanks

I hear good thinks about Duck Duck Go, it may even use Google's search indexing but it protects your privacy and doesn't track what you're searching. Which is both 'bad' (your results are harder to narrow down obscure searches) and good (general searches aren't contaminated by obscure guesses).

Searx. https://xo.wtf

I use DDG pretty exclusively. I've never had issues with it, I set it as default and didn't think about it after that

Brave search. The results have been better for me than most of the major players, summarizer comes in handy, and the discussions section showing forum posts on the searched for topic + top comment is useful. No native image section, but I work around that by !s bang to search on startpage when I need images. And yes, it has bangs, just like DDG.

I rotate between a handful of public SearX/SearXNG instances. I used to use Duckduckgo but after learning about the deal they had with Microsoft I completely stopped trusting them.

I'll be that weird guy using Bing! Ive signed up for Bing Rewards so I at least get some payment for the data they're collecting. Also the Bing ChatGPT feature is interesting and useful at times.

I was using Brave until last month. They did something and now image search redirects to Google/Bing so might as well use Google I guess...

Oh and also the normal search results got really bad all of a sudden.

I'm still sticking with google. I check duckduckgo occasionally but always find it to be subpar.

StartPage or DDG

DDG almost 100% of the time.

DuckDuckGo always

Today I tried Googling something about following kbin magazines on lemmy and got 0 relevant results on the first page. Then I entered the same search on DuckDuckGo and the first few results were all relevant to my search. Finally I decided to make the permanent switch to DuckDuckGo. Google has been undergoing enshitification for a long time now. Ever since I started needing to include Reddit at the end of all my searches. Since I no longer want to include Reddit in my searches, I need to find a better search engine in general and hopefully DDG can be that.

Results are very hit-and-miss, but if you're into the whole distributed search engine thing you should give Yacy a try. https://yacy.net/ I ran a node for a long time and as long as you keep feeding the index you usually get decent results for the things you search for often.

I wish I used DuckDuckGo more, but lately Google has been the default...

Presearch. I run a node and get paid for running it. The searches are solid as well.

I want to like SearX, but I just haven't gotten any great results from it so far, and I'm not really impressed by anything that just spits out Bing results (looking at you DDG).
you.com gives excellent results, but I'm not sure how much I should be trusting them.
Brave search has gotten MUCH better and I use that pretty on the daily now. I keep seeing good things about Kagi from our Lemmy friends here, thinking I should give that a shot

Would https://google.com/ncr help you? It's google "no country redirect"

Brave Search on all my personal devices, even though I'm getting worse results than up to a few months ago, so as much as it pains to admit it I sometimes use Google as a fallback (and the last time I actually used Google as my main search engine was back in 2012!). I probably should use metasearch engines more, though, but have been procrastinating learning how to effectively use them for a while now.

Aside from that, I have about a dozen sites saved with search keywords on Firefox (four of them are Wikipedia in different languages, though) that I use all the time.

I have been using brave search for a few weeks, and the results seem pretty good so far.

Google for ordinary search. For more challenging qwant, searX.

I use ddg most of the time. It fits all my needs. Sometimes when it comes to very niche things or complicated things I use startpage or brave.

I recently tried Brave and Duckduckgo, but I always come back to Startpage. It's a little bit slow but search result more satisfied for me.