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?

  • Marthirial@lemmy.world
    172·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • Syakaizin@lemm.ee
      11·
      6 days ago

      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.

  • countrypunk@slrpnk.net
    5·
    6 days ago

    Marginalia isn’t a daily driver search engine, but it specifically gets you obscure results. Pretty nifty side-engine to have.

  • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    6 days ago

    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.

      • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
        11·
        4 days ago

        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.

  • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
    5·
    7 days ago

    Duckduckgo is the best one, you can also use Startpage andWoogle

    • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
      2·
      6 days ago

      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

      • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        6 days ago

        Same I stopped using startpage after Google became horrible.

  • Ark-5@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    51·
    7 days ago

    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.

  • serenissi@lemmy.world
    21·
    5 days ago

    Google without logging in with ublock is best. No privacy implication, no ads, no ai response.

      • serenissi@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 days ago

        Like what? I mean you don’t save cookies/local storage either, or use private browsing always.

        At most google see your search terms, results you click and your ip address. Unless you’re using ipv6 without rotation or with unique prefix there is no identifying information.

        • Cyclohexane@lemmy.ml
          1·
          1 day ago

          If you’re using something like tor, and rotate on every single search, then that would be ideal.

          I assume you’re not using tor. That means all your searches can still be linked to you via the network source (ip address, etc.). Google can also use your search patterns to fingerprint you.

    • chloroken@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      7 days ago

      I’ve been using DDG for a while but just got hit with an AI summary finally, like Brave and then Google does. It’s such a turn off. I trust the information exactly 0%. Definitely considering just using SearXNG full time now. I liked DDG a lot but I’m so fickle, it doesn’t take much for me to swap.

      • Lemongrab@lemmy.one
        12·
        7 days ago

        You can disable that. Here are two links that disable that. Add it to Firefox or Chromium through the settings.

        Simple, only disables AI answers: https://duckduckgo.com/?kbe=0&q=%s

        Long, disables AI answers and ads: https://duckduckgo.com/?kak=-1&kax=-1&kbe=0&k1=-1&q=%s

        Steps to create a custom DDG search config:

        • Visit: https://duckduckgo.com/settings
        • Select the settings you want, for example dark mode.
        • Click the “Show Bookmarklet and Settings Data” button.
        • Copy the link, using my dark mode scenario would yield the URL https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d
        • Edit the URL by adding &q=%s to the end, which acts as a placeholder for the browser to replace with your actual search query. Using my example https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d&q=%s
        • Last step is add it to your browser. May differ between browsers, but generally look in the search engines tab of the settings.
        • chloroken@lemmy.mlEnglish
          4·
          7 days ago

          Thanks for the tips but it says that it can be disabled right on the summary itself. The issue isn’t disabling it for me. It’s that the information is bad and I don’t want a search engine that thinks this is useful. Sorry for not making that more clear. That’s what I meant by me being fickle.

  • Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    38·
    7 days ago

    SearXNG: https://github.com/searxng/searxng

    It enhances and respects privacy,
    is open source and self hostable,
    and queries multiple configurable search engines (google, bing, brave, duckduckgo, …)

    You can find a list of public hosted instances here:
    https://searx.space/

    However I prefer to slap an instance randomizer on top, so each of my queries goes through another public SearXNG instance, for more privacy, and mostly, to bypass rate-limiting after frequent queries.

    For this I use: