Someone (average smartphone user) complained to me the other day that there isn’t a clear solution to navigating the web because it’s either ai slop or the results are poor.
And I kinda agree, nowadays you do have to put in some more effort to get what you’re looking for.
And so I told them I’d compile a list of which search engines are best for what purpose.
So far I have:
Startpage: works, but does a poor job of finding product codes and whatnot.
Duckduckgo: gives more general results afaik
Ecosia: works great but relies on bing
I have tried things like qwant ect but haven’t really settled on those.
Any other suggestions?
I’d tell em to use udm14 but it’s still google so I’d rather keep that as a plan B.
I’ve been using degoog.org for a few months and frankly the experience has been flawless. I’m thinking of self-hosting it.
Normally I find what I search for
I use duckduckgo for every of my web searching needs. 85% of the times I get relevant or somewhat relevant results. The rest… well, I acknowledge that I may search for super nieche things and move on.
Only thing I don’t kinda like in duckduckgo though is that the result list may change if I navigate to somewhere and go back, but I can live with it.
Mostly DDG when I can. It’s terrible with Slovene searches, so I occasionally still have to use google.
Also our local najdi.si is just stupid.
Iirc ecosia uses google and Startpage is the same. I generally just use ddg unless I can’t find something, then I try Startpage
Brave search (and Mojeek,Yandex,Mwmbl through SearXNG) for most stuff and Start page as a final resort.
Running all my queries through SearXNG in normal windows and DuckDuckGo in private ones.
Ultimately duckduckgo is the best.
Bing and Google are out for obvious reasons. Startpage kept asking me to prove I’m human. Qwant blocked me whenever I enabled a VPN with an exit in a region they couldn’t run ads to. Ecosia is a non-profit so I’d feel bad blocking ads, but I don’t want to see ads. Mojeek returned garbage results. Kagi is ridiculously overpriced and restrictive. Brave Search often didn’t return the results I was looking for. And SearXNG I don’t remember what the problem was.
Qwant off of Orion on iOS. Don’t bother with Kagi. There are better options if they switch to graphene.
EDIT: SearXNG is perfect in every way except for consistently returning useful search results.
I often add the word “forum” to my searches to help get some actual human discussion instead of ad farming AI slop articles. Seems like the only way to figure things out these days.
I used DuckDuckGo in the past, it’s pretty nice but it’s proprietary and the company is a little bit too much pro-AI. They made a poll about AI approval and despite the majority of people were against, they kept it on their regular website and launched DDG No-AI instead.
Now I’ve moved to SearchXNG (https://searx.ononoki.org/), and it’s very good but the Bing search engine has a weird bug where doesn’t give relevant results. You can fix this by using DuckDuckGo and Brave engines instead.
DuckDuckGo is said to cooperate with Google. Brave Search doesn’t give me confidence because the browser has had many privacy violation scandals in its code. StartPage is proprietary, but has good privacy laws, since its origin is from the Netherlands, although the service has been down very frequently lately. I think the best is without a doubt SearX my dear friend. Link: https://metasearx.com/info/en/about
I’m a software engineer so I search quite a lot.
99% of my search is on duckduckgo and it provides me the best answers. Even if I’m using someone else’s device to show them something for example, and their default search engine is google, I will switch to ddg because it genuinely provides better answers.
Selfhosted SearXNG for everything.
Is your instance public? Wouldn’t it need to be to anonymize or privatize your usage?
Brave search works best for me. Even use Leo for ai results.
