I'm currently working on re-evaluating our search engine selection (reading privacy policies and all that good stuff), to see what to keep, remove, maybe add. I figured I might use some input from lemmy.
what do you use out of the ones we include? is anyone actually using search engines like qwant and metager?
I personally use SearX as my primary search engine (one local instance, the default searx.be instance as a fallback). Sometimes, I use one of the following search engines as well, but generally, there is no need for them in my case (for some of them, I retrieve their results with my SearX search, anyway). I rarely get to the point where SearX cannot provide the required and satisfactory results and I have to search with some specific search engine. The search engines I currently have set up in all of my browsers on both desktops and mobile phones are:
SearX,
DuckDuckGo,
StartPage,
Qwant,
Metager and
some specific search shortcuts for a few websites (Wikipedia, Lemmy, ...).
I have one Whoogle instance set up too, just for testing purposes, though. And I love the idea of per website aggregated results provided by Gigablast, but Gigablast is way too slow to use regularly. Interesting idea, though.
I also turn on javascript on at searx.neocities.org because otherwise I have to type
in my search query manually into a specific search instance.
However if your threat model requires it, you can also go to the no-javascript version of searx.neocities.org. You will not be automatically redirected to a random Searx instance when using no-JS version.
I type in a keyword in the url bar and then the service redirects me to a random Searx/SearXNG instance. For load balancing purposes, it seems great since no single server will be stressed significantly. The searches are spread across multiple instances.
Sometimes the redirected Searx/SearXNG instances output bad results(e.g. errors).
In that case, just use the Searx redirector again to have new random Searx/SearXNG instance.