I just make a post in NoStupidQuestions and use y'all like a search engine. :P

DuckDuckGo on Firefox. If you truly want to de-google your life avoid Chrome and Chromium based browsers like Edge and Brave

I'm out of the loop on DDG, what did they do?

https://kagi.com no ads, great results. It’s $5 a month but worth it imo

Half a dozen people in here already mentioned it, but Kagi has completely changed the search game and changed the way I use the Internet. It's like an old school search engine with modern conveniences like a chat bot and summarizer, but without the ads and other shenanigans.

Firefox allowed you to define the default search and have many many engines listed. That's been a standard feature for many years.

Kagi. Nothing else even comes close. Kagi is what Google used to be, before they decided they'll show you whatever is profitable, rather than what they know you're looking for.

I use SearXNG. It is a meta search engine so it use results from various other search engines and you can specify which with !. It does the job for me.

I've been incredibly happy with Kagi. All of the listicles and blogspam get shunted off into their own sections. Kagi also seems to do a pretty good job at finding "deep" results. Like, when I want to find out more information about some home automation gizmo, Kagi does a good job of finding some random blog post where someone has torn the gizmo apart and analyzed every strength and weakness it has. I still prefer Google for looking up restaurants and stuff, but I hardly use it anymore. I don't at all regret the $10 a month I pay to use Kagi.

Edit: I also like that Kagi lets you define rules. Occasionally I'll be forced to go to Reddit to get some information (I really try to go elsewhere first). I deleted my account, so I go to new Reddit by default (which I hate). I don't want to add an extension to redirect to old Reddit, but I can just replace the www with old automagically for all Reddit search results. Works great.

Kagi is by far the best search engine I've ever used. It is paid though.

check out ecosia.org! plant trees while you search! 🌳

The best I've found is Mojeek. The results take some getting used to because we're all used to Google's fuckery, but I've been using it for months, and it's quite good.

There's also SearXNG, though I'm not sure if that fits your needs. A couple public instances I've liked are:

https://searx.tiekoetter.com/

https://search.fuckoffgoogle.net/

Kagi.com

Duckduckgo if you use a vpn, everyone else throws speedbumos at VPN users... Prove your a human...

Meta search engines:

• SearX

  Open source, self hostable meta search engine.

• SearXNG

  Better version of SearX. A list of SearX and SearXNG instances is available at https://searx.space

Also meta search engines, but different:

• DuckDuckGo

  It's very privacy friendly, but it gets all the search results from Microsoft's Bing.

• Startpage

  Basically the same thing but it uses Google results. They are really focused on privacy too, they even are on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@StartpageSearch

  They're based in the EU (Netherlands) so they are also subject to the GDPR.

Independent:

• Brave Search

  They recently stopped using Google and Bing and created their own search index. It appears to be privacy friendly, but the company behind Brave is not ideal.

• Mojeek

  A small privacy focused search engine, that uses its own index. They're also on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@Mojeek

• Kagi

  I've seen many many people recommend it, but I have never really used it myself. It's not free, they charge $5/month for 300 searches and $10 for unlimited searches.

Been using Qwant for maybe a year or so. Recently found Swisscows too. I am not sure if Qwant uses their own index. I remember that they said that they were to create their own index, but the results looks suspiciously similar to Bing. Swisscows for sure runs their own index, and I find the results to be rather good

Kagi

It's a paid subscription but it's better than Google, I've found.

https://kagi.com/

Edit: I meant to also express my frustration that most browsers do not let you select a “default search engine” that can be used in the address bar aside from 3-5 pre-chosen engines. Seems like 2023 we should be able to customize that to our own liking.

Which browsers don't? I think this one can likely be chalked up to user error.