I'm trying to degoogle. I've heard good things about DuckDuckGo and I've been using it for the past few weeks and it's pretty solid. But I'm just wondering what the Lemmy/Piefed community prefer for a search engine.

Kagi. I know it gets trash talked for several reasons, but I've used ecosia, duckduckgo, tried searxng, and now I’m back to Kagi. I just like it better all around.

Mostly DuckDuckGo but I do want get kagi at some point. I’ve also been trying searxng self hosted but I want to use it more before I judge it since I probably still need to tweak some settings.

Startpage

Hard to escape Google for its consistency. At work though I use bing(it's trash) 😂

Edit: haters gonna hate, bing at work because I'm too lazy to switch defaults. Google for consistency, whether you like it or not 99% of the comments all says they use DDG and then admit they still use Google for consistency.

You'll find yourself always back to Google.

I use Qwant. Works great for everything I want it to do. Or ecosia if im on safari.

Been a Kagi user for about 6 months now. Not one negative thing to say. So refreshing to have good results again.

Qwant/Ecosia.

Used to use Kagi (paid search engine, if you don't know it) which was truly remarkable and well worth its cost, at least in my eyes. But, as a EU citizen, last year US shit show, made me realize I'd better rely less on US-based tech. So...

Kagi user since 2022, according to my account. I'll admit that I rarely ever cross-check with other search engines. I like their assistants too (they are basically re-selling access to all big LLMs in their Ultimate tier). But you don't really need those, what keeps me there are the good search results. (And the ability to easily block/raise whole domains on the results.)

Agreed. If anyone knows about an EU (or allies) search engine with a business model that's not strictly based on advertising (topped up by grants perhaps), let us know.

I use Ecosia/Qwant for now.

If I had the money, I would at the very least try Kagi, but for now I'm just surfing with DuckDuckGo using their "noai(dot)duckduckgo(dot)com" link. Auto turns off their dumb "duck ai" nonsense and using their filters to try and hide genAI images.

I also looked it up because I was curious and if the source is correct, I learned that the "noai" part of that link is a subdomain.

The only independent search engines that support my native Japanese are Google, Bing, Brave, and Yep.

Of these, I generally search using Brave, and if I'm not satisfied with the results, I search again using DuckDuckGo.
I don't use Yep because of its strict bot restrictions.

Also, on the rare occasions when I need to do an exact match or a search using site:, for some reason, Brave and DuckDuckGo are useless, so I reluctantly use Google, which is a shame.
As someone living in Japan, I do not recommend QWant, which is recommended in this comment section.

As I've commented before, this is because the service geoblocks countries that have non-Western languages ​​as their official languages.

XユーザーのQwantさん: 「Some of you have reported difficulties using Qwant in several countries around the world. It is a difficult decision but we have decided to close access to our services in certain countries where we don’t believe to provide the expected quality of service. Our apologies for this.」 / X

DDG is good enough for me.

I use Startpage, everything else kind of sucks imo.

Kagi. Well worth the money.

Right now I alternate between DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. Google results have been getting worse and the forcing of AI summaries was the final straw for me to stop using even the !g shortcut in DDG. At least DDG let's you disable them.

searxng (self hosted). But I understand not everyone can host something. There are public instances out there as well.

I'm quite crazy:

• Marginalia with the no JavaScript filter, then with that filter turned off
  • Good for finding technical stuff, and sometimes recipes! I often find cool blogs this way.
• SearxNG via farside.link
  • Unfortunately (and understandably) many of these sites use Anubis now, so I have to turn on JavaScript, and thanks to Google's ratelimits the results are either fantastic or not helpful at all
  • But, the public instances can work, so I try with 3 instances before moving on

Depending on the thing I'm searching for, I have search shortcuts set up. These shortcuts are really handy. It seems much easier to get good results on dedicated search engines for each task, than finding another general purpose search engine that's as good:

• Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikidata
• Some other wikis
• Lemmy (of course!)
• Peertube and podcast indexes
• Websites of grocery shops near me

Finally, if all else has failed, I use Google (which still unfortunately happens at least a couple of times per day 🙁). Although, reading the posts now, I should switch this stage to DuckDuckGo instead.

I'd quite like to set up my own instance of SearxNG + YaCy at some point. It'd be nice to configure SearxNG to basically do all of these steps at once that I'm doing manually, prioritise my YaCy index, but use other engines to fill in the gaps, and then gradually fill in the gaps in my YaCy index.

I just started using this one. So far I'm looking it. The Shopping tab is useless, but the search and image results are refreshingly different from the garbage you get from Google or DuckDuckGo.

Yes, but my search data doesn't leave my house. Also since my IP changed multiple times a week (not quite daily, but close), I prefer this to using someone else's instance. There is some obfuscation to be gained by searching through a public insurance as well, but my insurance is still used by multiple people, not just me.

I forgot it had a shopping tab. I never used it in any other search engine that I can recall. Google has been ass for many years. I stopped using it years ago. I'll take Yandex over Google at this point. Also, Yandex is good for sailing the seven seas.

DDG performance has dropped for me. I use a mix of their app and Firefox loaded with a searxng.

https://paulgo.io/

Works like old Google, No ads, tends to reduce SEO sloop that DDG is susceptible to.

I'm using Metager - you pay a very small amount per search, the amount is defined by which indexes and options you configure to use. It's pretty cheap - I loaded up 10€ a few months ago and still have about 2/3 left, and it's adfree. There is also the option to use completely anonymous tokens to "pay" for your searches, which uses a little bit more of your balance, but can't be tied back to your account. Search settings are saved only locally in the history - using the browser extension prevents losing your settings when deleting browser data.

At home I use startpage. I find much better than ddg.

At work i use

1. Startpage
2. Bing

Because Im working with a MS product at work, sometimes Bing get better results when I search for something very specific work related.

I'm using paid Kagi subscription, and it makes searching for stuff feel like it used to before Big Tech broke the internet. I can actually find what I'm looking for again.

The "SlopStop" feature is worth it alone, but I love how I can choose what types of results and sources to prioritize.

10/10 Highly recommended.

Not necessarily.

You configure which engines you want it to use.

Although lately the list of engines which are working well seems to be quite small.

Yeah I'm with Qwant for the moment.

I used to use Kagi.

I used to use DDG before that.

I don't really have any complaints about any of these.

I'm trying to get better at using bangs to search on the sites I'm specifically looking for.

I use DDG on everything, even the work PC. It works well enough for my purposes. I don’t even hate duck.ai and it can be useful, but I’ll double check anything I take from it.

Duck no AI version

i used to use duckduckgo, still sometimes do. but i switched to qwant and i think i like it better

I use Qwant and Ecosia.

NoAI DuckDuckGo (noai.duckduckgo.com)

it has decent enough results and disables the unwanted AI features (I don't want to prompt an LLM whenever I search something)

I am willing to switch to something else, right now DDG is good enough.

I'm brazilian, our official language is Portuguese, and Qwant is not available here either. It seems they don't understand that people can speak two or more languages? They could just put an "English-only results" warning, but ok.

Can you describe why you think its better than Qwant or DDG? I tried it but didn't felt that much difference to have an account for search engine.

Ecosia

Yes, I think DDG is actually being quite reasonable with its AI integrations so I have nothing against it and would rather have it than not.

eTools and DDG, sometimes google/startpage. I'm surprised how little known eTools is.

same for korea, qwant used to work but they seemed to have blocked access around 2023 or so

i personally use ecosia

I've used DDG for the past 7 years or so. When ever I don't find what I'm looking for I just add !g to the search term and it Googles it for me.

I used ddg and startpage, they are both great. Although I slightly perfer ddg, but stays with startpage because it is european.

I also turn on ads to support them. However, now I have more money but less time to scroll pass all these ads, I switched to kagi, which is ad-free and fast.
The price is not cheap and they are not based in Europe (they are registered in the U.S. with employees all over the world, which is technically better than U.S. centric ddg), however there is no alternatives that I am aware of.

https://brave.search.com/

• Independent unlike DDG and other
• Parity with google for search results
• Actually good AI integration where it never hallucinates and only summarizes the sources it encounters
• Great integration of wikipedia, stackoverflow etc. into search results
• Great UI

As someone studying Japanese, oooo that's awesome I gotta check them out! :D

Brave is decent! I struggles with looking g for smaller local results sometimes. Like you really have to specify the town/cities for small businesses and stuff. Which I suppose is good. That probably means it's not creeping on your location constantly

Qwant and Ecosia are especially notable for their efforts to build an independent search index.

For those who don't know, most "independent" search engines, including DDG, still rely on Bing or Google results behind the scenes. They basically just act as a middleman by taking your query, forwarding it to one of those providers, and then returning the results to you. Some of them will attempt to reshuffle the order of those results to push the ones they think are best towards the top, but they're still fundamentally limited to what Google and Bing choose to give them.

Presently a lot of Qwant and Ecosia searches go through Bing, but they're collaborating to build an independent index which will allow them to become fully independent. I believe they're already serving a mix of results from Bing and their own index, with plans to bias more and more towards their index as it matures.

No ai ddg has been a decent general search engine, but if I can't find something I'll us marginalia, mojeek, alltheinternet, and even yandex (if I'm desperate). For your research: InstallGentoo Wiki has a fairly comprehensive list of search engines albeit not the most up to date; Seirdy has a blog post reviewing many search engines including some more niche ones; and The Search Engine Map illustrates which engines use what index.

Just curious, what made you change from Kagi?

It feels like spam to mention Kagi since it's all over the place (even on Hacker News), but I've been a subscriber since the beginning and it made me a "2x programmer" due to their good results.

If I had no money left, I would try SearXNG.

I don't know how those search engines evolved, but last time I checked (a few years ago), Qwant was the worst search engine ever, and DDG was pretty average. I don't know how Kagi works, but it's good for every query. I usually don't recommend it because it's expensive ($10 a month) but it really changed how I work, especially for programming topics.

As an example, Qwant still uses w3schools as the reference for C++, which is some "4chan trolling" level of stupidity.