Technology

I run my own SearXNG instance, which is a metasearch engine that shows results from a bunch of other search engines. I find it incredibly useful! It's very customizable as well

I use Duckkduckgo, I'd like to use Kagi though, From my short experience, the results were excellent and I'd like to curate the websites I like and don't more as I think that would improve things the results even more.

I'll be that weird guy using Bing! Ive signed up for Bing Rewards so I at least get some payment for the data they're collecting. Also the Bing ChatGPT feature is interesting and useful at times.

I mostly use Startpage or DuckDuckGo.

I want to like SearX, but I just haven't gotten any great results from it so far, and I'm not really impressed by anything that just spits out Bing results (looking at you DDG).
you.com gives excellent results, but I'm not sure how much I should be trusting them.
Brave search has gotten MUCH better and I use that pretty on the daily now. I keep seeing good things about Kagi from our Lemmy friends here, thinking I should give that a shot

I wish I used DuckDuckGo more, but lately Google has been the default...

Startpage primarily because I was told that the Google results are better than DuckDuckGo but I never noticed any big difference except that Startpage has deactivated NSFW content by default. DuckDuckGo feels a little bit snappier and less cluttered tho.

I was using Brave until last month. They did something and now image search redirects to Google/Bing so might as well use Google I guess...

Oh and also the normal search results got really bad all of a sudden.

Brave search. The results have been better for me than most of the major players, summarizer comes in handy, and the discussions section showing forum posts on the searched for topic + top comment is useful. No native image section, but I work around that by !s bang to search on startpage when I need images. And yes, it has bangs, just like DDG.

Presearch. I run a node and get paid for running it. The searches are solid as well.

I use one of the searxng instances or startpage.com

I use DDG pretty exclusively. I've never had issues with it, I set it as default and didn't think about it after that

I use DDG and im pretty happy with it. I now pretty much only use google if i need to find working hours and location of a store on google maps, as DDG doesnt have that information as obviously available

I'm using Startpage.com (can set the location - I also have the problem that I use a VPN and keep getting not the language I want. IDK how to make it stick though), and Kagi paid for a bit now.

DuckDuckGo always

actually google.
all other search engines give worse results, buggy (I'm looking at you, searx; it fails very frequently), or just have worse ui/ux

but yeah i agree, regional bs is an issue. with region set to Ukraine and searching in English/Ukrainian i get a lot of russian websites for some reason.
I can't stand russian and i fully blocked the whole .ru/.su tld. They are of no use to me anyway.
google still suggests them even with language filters (lang:...)

Ecosia. It's not a great search engine, but it's good enough most of the time, and it plants trees.

It doesn't necessarily return the results I want, though. Possibly because it isn't tailored to me like Google is (thanks, data-scraping!) so sometimes I use Google if I want a search engine to use context.

For example, I couldn't remember the name of the show 'Voltron'. If I search Ecosia for 'cartoon show giant robots made of smaller robots' then I get pictures, or snippets of the phrase 'giant robot' or 'show giant' or whatever, literally looking for it. But then I swap to Google and it uses context to show me Voltron stuff among the results so I can be like YEAH THAT'S IT NOW I can make my extremely topical joke to my friend, thanks

I hear good thinks about Duck Duck Go, it may even use Google's search indexing but it protects your privacy and doesn't track what you're searching. Which is both 'bad' (your results are harder to narrow down obscure searches) and good (general searches aren't contaminated by obscure guesses).

I have been using brave search for a few weeks, and the results seem pretty good so far.

I recently tried Brave and Duckduckgo, but I always come back to Startpage. It's a little bit slow but search result more satisfied for me.

I tried you.com for a long period of time. It has some nice ways to present content but overall I too often did not find what I was looking for so I switched back to startpage.com as unpersonalized version of Google.

Startpage is great and uses g00g's search index. DuckDuckGo used to be my goto, but then they switched to using Microsoft Bing's search index.

I just recently started using Startpage. The results to me so far seem pretty good but im in a country where I speak the language. And I like that it doesn't save my searches. For that I use DDG.

Sadly, I use Google. Their query syntax is so good and can be so precise in their results. I wish to get any search engine with that quality in their query syntax.

Searxng (searx.be) / startpage

Mine... One of the SearXNG instances published at https://searx.space.

Ecosia, but I need to setup a SearXNG instance sometime.

I mainly use DDG, including bangs to search other sites, but I occasionally still use Google if I'm having trouble finding something.

I use Bing now due to Microsoft Rewards and Bing AI

I use a mix of DuckDuckGo, Bing and links through Bing Chat.

Brave search. When I don't find something I try with google.

Most of the time brave search is good enough. But everyone searches for different things so idk.