Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I’ve ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down).

Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones” or “Realtek Driver Download” and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.

And you can directly define, which sites you’d like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.

Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.

And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.

Lastly, I created a so-called “Lens”, which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I’ve defined - see image.

Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.

(copied from another thread I replied to)

My top ones:

DuckDuckGo - may not be as private as they claim, but has been my go-to for years. Simple, but feature-full and still mostly decent for search.

Marginalia - a search engine that favors text heavy websites, perfect for research

Searx instance - not my main due to how spotty the instances can be and lazy to set up mine. But can basically grab stuff from all the “big” search engines, which saves a lot of time. I don’t consider it a godsend like most people do, though. As since big engines can give poor results.

frogfind - a duckduckgo interface meant for older computers that converts webpages to basic html. Perfect for news articles and tutorials where you want to skip the “fluff”.

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Startpage, google search results without ads, trackers but much slower, the slowness can get annoying sometimes when my internet speed is bad

Duck-Duck-Go. Getting worse for privacy (allegedly) but it’s been overall great for me. If I can’t find what I’m searching for on the first page or two I just add a !g to the front to search an anonymized google for that query.

I use DuckDuckGo and it workw quite well and at least they say they protect your privacy (I am sure they do a better job than GAFAM/BigTech spyware mafia), but am looking for something better since I found out it has some agreement with Microsoft and I do not trust those spyware-producing convicted monopoly abusers at all.

I use DuckDuckGo, I forgot how to live without the search tags such as !yt, !fb, !w to search specific sites.

funny that after a long time using DuckDuckGo, I realized that it is a better search engine than Google. I mean, if you’re looking for answers to something like “how old is so-and-so?” Google will give you the answer, but if you need links about your DDG search it’s much better. Also, I use the “!” which is part of my search workflow.

Here all the syntax: https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/syntax/

I have to shout out Wiby. It is focused on like weird personal websites from the early 2000s, that kind of thing. Absolutely not a general-purpose search engine, but mashing the “surprise me” button will take you to all sorts of fun places.

Duck duck go cause I’m a basic bitch

Honestly? Bing chat has been quite good to me if I have specific questions. It searches the web and gives me a summary.

For general purpose I use Ecosia.

For a while I used Swisscows almost exclusively. Due to a job I had I got away from it as I needed extremely specific information. Now that I’m typing this I am considering giving it another shot.

• SearXNG
• When I need code snippets, I fire up Edge and ask ChatGPT.

might not count, but I use startpage, which uses google while allegedly keeping none of the info that makes google problematic
sometimes i use duckduckgo,

in firefox you can make a shortcut to type anything in any searchbar too, like so: (in this example I’ll use kbin.social search)

We type something into search to get the exact url we need, that ends up being https://kbin.social/search?q=[something]
in this case [something] is obviously what we typed, so we save a bookmark of https://kbin.social/search?q=%s where %s swaps out what we type when we call to the bookmark
Then we give the bookmark a keyword that makes it easy to type, it can be anything but I’ll just use kb
now whenever i type ‘kb somethingsomething’ it will search somethingsomething on kbin.social

I use this for youtube, arch wiki, the type-effectiveness graph on bulbapedia pages ( https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/%s_(Pok%C3%A9mon)#Type_effectiveness ), etc, etc

I use you.com as it’s centered on an ai chatbot and pulls in traditional web search results to augment it’s answers. it works quite well.