Ask Lemmy

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.

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! 🌳

Kagi.com

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

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

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

https://kagi.com/

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

qwant.com

Kagi is the best around if you are willing to pay. If I had to cancel my subscription for whatever reason, I would go back to DDG.

Another option is SearXNG. It's meta search engine, which means that it aggregates other search engines like Google and Bing but without tracking or logging, because your searches are proxied using a public instance, that will mix your search with the ones from other people.

And about default search engine, don't know what you're talking about, both chrome and Firefox allows this, in mobile and desktop.

https://searx.space/