What search engine do you use? (and why?)

DuckDuckGo. I can't live without !bangs.

Do you mean like !google or !amazon ? I use ddg. Just making sure I know what you mean
- yup. or rather their short form, !g and !a in your example, because no one's got time to type out the entire names (:

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

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.
- It is very meh. But I think if you're able to, it's well worth the price. Just don't get the standard plan. That one is god awful.
- It's so worth it.
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?
- 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
- Bit biased cause I've had it for a while and have a 'legacy plan'. But even without that, absolutely.
Love Kagi. I switched and never had any reason to use Google again. Its that good.
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".
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.
Kagi is absolutely wonderful. Highly recommend giving it ago. Gives me better results than google while having a fair privacy policy
I was using DuckDuckGo and it was giving me pretty 'eh' results, only marginally better than google on the surface level, but both weren't really usable for deep older searches. (and ddg starting to add sus ads/promoted) Brave is better, but Kagi has been fantastic when I've really needed to find something specific, technical, or very old. I think the best way to come about the pricing structure and limited search results is that I think it's not supposed to be your only search engine from then on. There are times when you need what kagi gives in terms of producing quality and relevant results, and times you just wanna search "[company name] reviews/is a scam?" that using kagi wouldn't serve you better than anything else, so it's more of a tool that you bring out when you aren't finding what you need with free search engines. On it's own page it doesn't try and oversell you on it, they admit that the majority of people don't need paid search most of the time.

I haven't approached if it's an early netflix thing where you could split the bill with others for one login/family plan, that might make it more feasible.
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.

DuckDuckGo, but I've been testing Qwant (also privacy focused) lately as well.

SearX-ng

It's not comparable in quality at all...
- It can literally use any search engine you think of as a backend, so its strictly higher quality? Unless thats what you meant
- 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.

Duck duck go first, and if results are shit, I default back to google

Startpage. It uses Googles results, but you will not get tracked that much

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.

I hate adds. I was using Neeva. Just switched to Kagi. After nearly 3 weeks, it looks like 300 searches/month will work for me. So $5 a month is fine.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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).

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.

Another DuckDuckGo user here. I really like it but wish I could use boolean with it.

You can, it just works a bit differently than google if that is what you’re used to. It doesn’t outright exclude results with -, just de-emphasizes it in the results, of course with how tailored many web pages are to gaming search algorithms that doesn’t do much. If you want to outright eliminate certain websites from the search you can do that with -site:siteyouwantgone.here

Just Google, unless I'm looking to pirate something. Then I use Yandex.

duckduckgo primarily, but have been starting to dabble with a self hosted Whoogle.

DuckDuckGo. I wanted something privacy-respecting, but Startpage was blocked in my country and SearX had problems with my language. Anyway I've heard an advertising company bought Starpage so I wont use it. Also bang shortcuts are great!

(Also is it just me or DDG doesn't approve new bangs now?)

I also use DuckDuckGo

Duckduckgo, works like I want it to and it's not Google. Never had a problem with its search results either. Tried several others as well including searx and ecosia but I found their image search inferior to ddg's.

Kagi is better though. I was using ddg for a long time but had to use Google now and then to get good results.

I've been using presearch.com and and quite happy with the results it gives for any question. Yes, there are one or two sponsored links, but the rest consists of great results

Oh wow, I checked it and for people simply lurking by, you can click on a website icon and instantly go do the research on that website

Bing because I'm getting paid for it

I use Brave Search. wAs going to switch to Neeva but they are shutting down now.

Ecosia on my tablet because of nice integrated browser and DuckDuck+Firefox on the PC

Am also checking out Brave on PC at the moment

DDG, it works well enough for me, and not that I got used to bangs I cannot let go of them

Google, because of inertia and not being given a good reason to switch.

Google. Sue me, I really only care about results when it comes to search. It's mostly just Google and Bing actually providing results and Google's are better.

I moved away from Google because of the results

brave search on desktop, DDG on mobile.

ddg.gg

Startpage most of the time but its so slow in showing you the result. When im using the web for studying i just use google without an account because its just WAY faster

Ecosia on desktop, DuckDuckGo on mobile.

I use Bing just because it was immediately available when I decided I didn't want to use Google anymore.

I hope this mullvad project will work out

https://mullvad.net/en/browser

The only problem I've come across with Mullvad is that it's so tight that I can't even access the internet at work on that browser lol

Google most of the time, Yandex if I need to find pictures. Their image search is more like Google's before they nerfed it. I've used Qwant off and on in the past and rather liked it.

I used Chrome for the longest time, before finding out about it dropping for adblockers. I decided to give Firefox a try, and I can honestly say that I prefer it a lot over Chrome. The advantages are too many to list here xd.m

those are browsers, not search engines.

I used DuckDuckGo for years but I recently decided to make my own minimalist frontend to Bing API + Brave API and I added bangs of course.

I'm using DuckDuckGo but I'm going to switch back to Brave Search when images will be ready

I usually switch between DDG and Bing. I usually get what I'm looking for between these two guys.

https://search.brave.com

Ever since Bing introduced their AI stuff I've been trialing it + Edge on my main computer. It's not so bad but sometimes I do need to use Google to actually find what I'm looking for. Currently using Google on everything else though. The AI stuff is actually pretty good but I feel like if Google makes their implementation more widespread most people are just going to use that vs Bing.