I’ll go first. I’ve used a lot of search engines, I used duckduckgo for quite some time but found their search results kinda bad. I’m currently using ecosia the search results are similar to ddg’s but at least I’m planting trees, so there’s that.

      • noodlejetski@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        yup. or rather their short form, !g and !a in your example, because no one’s got time to type out the entire names (:

  • nullishcat@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
    101·
    1 year ago

    Kagi. Yes, it’s paid and the pricing structure is really meh, but:

    • Actual privacy
    • No BS like with DDG
    • AI features (like a “quick answer” feature that’s really useful)
    • Has its own index along with others
    • Search results are great, probably better than DDG’s
    • “Lenses” (basically narrow results by a set of sites)
    • Devs are pretty cool
    • Rick@thesimplecorner.orgEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      For some reason the thought of a paid search engine has never even crossed by mind before. I’ve been using DDG but this has peaked my curiosity. Thank you.

      Edit: The pricing is… very… meh.

    • Pumpkin@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I didn’t know it was privacy focused or that they were building their own index, that’s really cool. Do you think it’s worth the money?

      • zarquon@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        It’s only a few bucks a month. I think so.

        The only thing I don’t like is needing to be logged in to search. That always feels like a huge invasion of privacy. The at least claim that they don’t log search contents though

      • nullishcat@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Bit biased cause I’ve had it for a while and have a ‘legacy plan’. But even without that, absolutely.

    • DengueDucky@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I want to give it a try but it’s hard to justify the cost with limited searches. I don’t want to have to keep track of how many times I’ve searched or second guess if I “really need to search for that”.

    • bit@kbin.social
      21·
      1 year ago

      Kagi is absolutely wonderful. Highly recommend giving it ago. Gives me better results than google while having a fair privacy policy

    • smoke_bird@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been using Kagi for a few months now and I love it. When I think about how much of my life revolves around accurate information, the price is negligible.

    • pineapple@lemmy.pineapplemachine.comEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Kagi. Yes, it’s paid and the pricing structure is really meh, but:

      Huh. I hadn’t heard of this one before, but I think I’m going to have to try it out.

      • darcmage@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        Isn’t that hard to determine without specifying which engines are used in your chosen instance? Searx/Searng has provided superior results for me using a combination of engines compared to anything provided by any of the alternatives by themselves.

      • teoria@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        It can literally use any search engine you think of as a backend, so its strictly higher quality? Unless thats what you meant

  • Rats@kbin.social
    6·
    1 year ago

    Duckduckgo for the most part, especially if I already know where I want to get to. Google as a backup like others are saying.

  • cereals@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Most small search engines use bing results which are a hit or miss compared to Google.

    Startpage is the only privacy focused one I found that uses Google search results. The UI is fine for the most part, except the image search maybe.

    Edit: typo

  • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.deEnglish
    61·
    1 year ago

    SearX-NG, coming off DuckDuckGo it wasn’t a major change in the internal structure (the search gets relayed over to a larger search engine), but there’s no one company behind it like DDG. They’ve been working together with Microsoft on some rather sketchy things.

    I would still love to self-host something decent (that doesn’t relay over to a company), but nothing like that exists as far as I know.

  • Adderbox76@lemmy.caEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Duck Duck Go. It just works for me. I’ve never had a problem with it’s results.

  • Adi2121@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been using SearXNG. It is a fork of SearX, a popular open source metasearch search engine. Basically SearX allows you to use multiple search engines for a search, and only the results are there, no ads. SearXNG changes the UI to be better, adds some other engines for a variety of things to search, like images. Currently I’m using ericafteric.top as my instance; it is the fastest US instance with search suggestions support since I can’t selfhost.

    • pimeys@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I run my own SearXNG instance too. I set it up to a Hetzner box, then blocked all ports from the firewall except on the Tailscale network. This means the machine which wants to use the search needs to be connected first to the same Tailscale network. It allows me to prevent being blocked by the search providers for too much traffic and is been working great. I just open http://SearXNG from my browser and start searching.

  • Kissaki@feddit.deEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    DuckDuckGo

    I also use Firefox search bookmarks for searching specific sites.

    Search Bookmark: You prepare the URL with a %s placeholder and give the bookmark a tag, and you can type tag searchterm and it’ll open it.

    I’m using it for opening word definitions, word translations, searching reference documentation, searching specific platforms/websites/media types, etc.

  • NebLem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    DDG first, Google if that fails and I think the query should have gotten good results, Bing Chat if I’m still really not sure about a topic or if I want some of its summarization (or I’m just feeling lazy).