I used google for most of my life, for the past couple months I’ve been using brave search, but I still end up using google often because google images is far better than brave search images. I’m also worried that maybe brave search isn’t the best choice. What would you guys recommend?
Google without logging in with ublock is best. No privacy implication, no ads, no ai response.
It may be one of the better solutions, but there are certainly privacy implications
I use DDG but I’m always open to alternatives.
All of them at once: SearXNG.
It aggregates results from whichever you select.
I have used brave search which was really good I really liked the ai search although i moved away from it after seeing how bad google ai search was (saying things like its a good idea to eat rocks due to not being able to recognise satire) and I managed to get brave to do the same thing with a different onion article so i dont really trust any ai search now. At the moment I use searx it’s incredibly private especially if you are willing to self host (I am not) and you have so much customisation you can use any search index so you don’t have to worry about bad results.
Qwant also seams really good although I haven’t tried it, same with ecosia especially if you like planting trees although I use an ad blocker so that doesn’t work for me.
Imo there are so many great free browsers it’s not really worth paying for a browser.
I also don’t recommend duck duck since it used to have a tracking deal with Microsoft. It doesn’t have it anymore but I think it’s enough to lose faith in it.
qwant and ecosia are both using bing, with the latter using google sometimes: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ map needs updating for that latter point
I don’t really see why this is relevant unless google or bing results are bad (and from my experience they are pretty good) since privacy focused search angines anonymize all search engine requests so you can’t be tracked by google or bing. Also that map really is outdated brave uses it’s own indexing now so it no longer relies on google.
Find a variant of Searx you like.
Marginalia isn’t a daily driver search engine, but it specifically gets you obscure results. Pretty nifty side-engine to have.
I use and recommend Qwant or DuckDuckGo
I am paying for Kagi. Has worked well and some searched topics had been human curated so the answers are right there in the results. But it also does a good job with obscure searches, although it seems it tries to alter the meaning or context in order to show more results.
Best feature is the ability to hide from the results shit sites like Reddit or Quora.
Same - I paid last year and it just expired, so I tried Brave Search, DDG and Startpage but they weren’t cutting it for me so I’ve just gone back to Kagi.
4get.ca lets you select your scraper among pretty much everything else listed here, and it can be themed with my preferred color scheme right out of the box, so it gets my vote.
DuckDuckGo
I’ve been using Ecosia, it’s basically Google results, but with more privacy, and they invest the revenue in tree-planting projects.
Duckduckgo is the best one, you can also use Startpage andWoogle
I’ve jumped around to pretty much all search engines (except kagi) and I’ve settled on and been using duckduckgo for the longest duration out of all the alternatives
Same I stopped using startpage after Google became horrible.
I use Bing because it gives points at ~$5/month from letting it spy on you. Microsoft doubles their points to $10/month when you send to a charity. Using Bing vs technically/privately better options gets ~$120/yr sent to the FSF. I asked FSF and they validated that they get what MSFT says they send.
Regarding more privacy-marketed search engines, I perceive the privacy argument from corporate search as marketing. Any corporate search engine should be selling your data to maximize profit, even if you pay monthly.
Fsf?
Free Software Foundation
I’ve really been enjoying Kagi. They seem to have a pretty good privacy policy as well. However Searxng is probably the best for privacy since it’s self hosted.