I heard a lot of bad stuff about Brave and their CEO lately and am now unsure if the search engine is any good? Do they censor stuff? Is any data collected? Can it be considered private?
If you'd not recommend it, what are good alternatives and why?
I was a long time duckduckgo user before, so anything similar to it or brave search would be great. I'm not into self hosting.
Their CEO is anti-vax and homophobic. Brave Browser (not search) has had some controversy around including crypto, replacing ads with their own, and having had inserted affiliate links into the URL bar in the past.
censor stuff
Hard to say, the job of a search engine is to show you what you want to find.
If I try to stop using every company or service that has an obnoxious CEO spouting ignorant views I'm afraid I wouldn't even be able to access the web. At the very least I'm glad companies like Brave give lip service to privacy to highlight awareness.
Have also been using it for a while now, it's the best alternative I tried so far. downsides are cost, closed-source, and my fear that they're gonna take VC money in the future. So far, I can stand behind their offering tho. And the built-in feature to lower or raise results from certain pages is amazing.
I've been using Kagi for a few months now. Before that I used Brave Search. With Brave search I had to use the g! bang every few searches. Now with Kagi I have maybe used it five times in total. It has so much better search results!
Same here. The devs are super responsive to the community and actually care about privacy. The heated discussion on whether to include a suicide warning with certain searches is a banger read.
I stopped using Startpage because they regularly limits service access to IPs reserved for VPNs or Tor and it was immensely annoying having to prove that I'm a human each time I searched for anything.
Have you also heard of SearXNG?
I’d be also curious to know what annoyed you about DDG or Brave search.
It's a really good search engine and I have no reason to doubt their claims about privacy and cencorship but I have to say no there because beside finding piratebay in the normal search results it's all just their claims and I don't know of any sientific study or similar that ever tested any of the claims. If you don't trust those promises self hosting SearX is probably a good option and I haven't tried it in years but Qwant is another one with their own index aka independent results.
I use a lot of search engines, none of these are Google, Bing or Brave.
I use mainly Andisearch as primary search and Mojeek as second (both are between the most privacy protecting search engines out there). Apart some others (Qwant, DDG, Startpage, MetaGer, and some specific ones for news, images, resources, Url Checks, etc. and interns from social networks)