Technology

I use Bing now due to Microsoft Rewards and Bing AI

I just recently started using Startpage. The results to me so far seem pretty good but im in a country where I speak the language. And I like that it doesn't save my searches. For that I use DDG.

Sadly, I use Google. Their query syntax is so good and can be so precise in their results. I wish to get any search engine with that quality in their query syntax.

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.

Ecosia, but I need to setup a SearXNG instance sometime.

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

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

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

Selfhosted SearxNG with Google and duckduckgo

I tried you.com for a long period of time. It has some nice ways to present content but overall I too often did not find what I was looking for so I switched back to startpage.com as unpersonalized version of Google.

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 run my own SearXNG instance, which is a metasearch engine that shows results from a bunch of other search engines. I find it incredibly useful! It's very customizable as well

actually google.
all other search engines give worse results, buggy (I'm looking at you, searx; it fails very frequently), or just have worse ui/ux

but yeah i agree, regional bs is an issue. with region set to Ukraine and searching in English/Ukrainian i get a lot of russian websites for some reason.
I can't stand russian and i fully blocked the whole .ru/.su tld. They are of no use to me anyway.
google still suggests them even with language filters (lang:...)

I use one of the searxng instances or startpage.com

Searxng (searx.be) / startpage

Ddg, brave and startpage

Like several others, self hosted searxng instance. Suits me perfectly

DDG all the way

Hosting my own Whoogle and LibreX, they work decently well for my purpose.

startpage

Ecosia and DuckDuckGo

I use duckduckgo. One thing I notice about the google language is that my phone has french as the os language so google will be in french but then I go to a computer that has english as it's language, sign in and google will be in french (even though my account is set to english). So check your OS and browser language settings on all devices you signed in on.

I'm a developer and I've been trying out www.phind.com, has been decent so far. It gives you both a chatGPT/AI answer and a regular search engine result at the same time. Just don't rely on it to write an accurate RegEx...