I don't understand why lots of you answer with chatGPT. It's not a search engine! And you shouldn't use it like a search engine.
Mostly duck duck go.
I use mostly either ddg or brave search. I miss the google of pre 2010, when the majority of its results were good.
I also use Yandex whenever I'm looking for pirate stuff, the only engine that doesn't block those kinds of results.
Currently down for updates, but does a great job of avoiding SEO abuse/blog spam/etc. Takes you back to the earlier days of the internet when it felt like there were more forums/individual sites/etc. They’re still out there, just hidden under all the junk.
I've been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for the past couple of years. I occasionally fall back to Google.
I was in this camp but find that the results I've gotten from DDG have been notably worse for the last year or so, to the point that I don't expect useful results to come out of it any more at this point. Even if I searched "site name" because I couldn't remember the URL was spelled "site-name.com" I've had no results coming from DDG, while Google had it as the first hit.
Have you experienced something similar? Are there techniques or workarounds I'm not aware of?
Kagi. Very happy with it. Best $5 it recently invested. Gives me much better results than Google and all the others.
DuckDuckGo. Google if DDG isn't cutting it.
I run my own searx instance
I've been using DuckDuckGo since, at least 2010, maybe earlier. If its results aren't up to snuff, I'm not aware of that because they're what I'm used to. I fall through to Google ( !g) if I think there might be more out there. The bang commands are so good. I use DDG as my main search in my search bar and then I can use the bang commands to get to whatever specialized search I want from there. It's a meta-search-engine.
Self-hosted Searxng. It's shared to multiple people which kills a lot of the usefulness in Google or others trying to track my instance.
I exclusively use AltaVista.
I use DuckDuckGo. Including using their browser on iOS and windows.
Duck Duck Go too
@SemioticStandard Kagi. I used DDG for a long time, and Kagi is strictly better. Specifically, it’s very snappy and I trust the privacy guarantees even more since I’m a paying customer.
Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I've ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down) without looking for Reddit results all the time.
Just simple searches like "Best gaming headphones" or "Realtek Driver Download" and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.
And you can directly define, which sites you'd like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.
Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.
And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit or archive.org versions), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.
Lastly, I created a so-called "Lens", which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I've defined - see image.
Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.
(copied from another thread I replied to)
+1 for Kagi, seems a great value to me, well worth the price to not have any ads, no tracking (leap of faith here) and great search results.
Qwant (but I hate all search engines nowadays)
Kagi on iOS and Mac. DDG w/Google on Android because my preferred Android browser, Vivaldi, doesn't offer Kagi. Anyone know how to default Vivaldi to Kagi?
Duck Duck Go is the only search engine I use. Switched away from Google for privacy reasons and haven't missed it a bit.
DuckDuckGo for general searches
Google for image searches
Google maps for local businesses (including their website)
BingGPT for simple research answers (e.g. What door closers will fit on a Norton 1600 bolt pattern?)
Google, duck duck go when I don't want to see ads for days based on what I'm searching, Bing and Perplexity when I want to avoid doing a series of searches to learn something.
I'm still looking for a search engine that doesn't use data from my IP address to provide targeted results. In the meantime, I've gone back and forth between using SearXNG instances and using Startpage, but there's really not a decent search engine in existence, from what I can tell.
I use my selfhosted Whoogle instance for search
Thanks for making me aware of Kagi, I've been trialing it and getting decent results is a breath of fresh air in a world of blogspam and LLM garbage.
DuckDuckGo, but mostly because of the !bangs. I do 90% of my searches through StartPage (!s), and the rest directly on a few websites (Wikipedia, YouTube, Arch wiki...).
What are !bangs and how do I use them?
DuckDuckGo for me personally.
@SemioticStandard Ecosia
Google and ChatGPT, I tried DDG several years ago, but the results were not good, might try it again
I am a long time DuckDuckGo user. I came for privacy and stayed because of the features.
I typically use StartPage, sometimes DDG. Occasionally I pop in and check out how Brave Search is progressing, out of curiosity.
I would love to use Searx, but I've never found an instance where functionality wasn't breaking all the time or it just randomly goes offline. As much as I want to be, I've learned that I'm not much of a self-hoster. So, yeah, every time I try Searx, I wind up back at StartPage. If anyone has any solid, reliable instances they know of, I'd love to check them out.
Currently DuckDuckGo, but I will switch to SearXNG because of this.
DDG for everyday usage. Sometimes I try searching the same things on google just to compare results. I've tried searxng instances on and off in the past but its rarely been reliable for me and self hosting isn't really an option for me.
DuckDuckGo, and before that, I used ixquick(which is now StartPage).
DuckDuckGo. Its results are much better than Google's in my experience. Whenever I Google something, all I get is a list of online stores I've never heard of, and they have nothing to do with my search input.
I use SearXNG and Ecosia.
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