Technology

I don't understand why lots of you answer with chatGPT. It's not a search engine! And you shouldn't use it like a search engine.

Mostly duck duck go.

https://www.marginalia.nu/

Currently down for updates, but does a great job of avoiding SEO abuse/blog spam/etc. Takes you back to the earlier days of the internet when it felt like there were more forums/individual sites/etc. They’re still out there, just hidden under all the junk.

I use mostly either ddg or brave search. I miss the google of pre 2010, when the majority of its results were good.

I also use Yandex whenever I'm looking for pirate stuff, the only engine that doesn't block those kinds of results.

I run my own searx instance

Kagi. Very happy with it. Best $5 it recently invested. Gives me much better results than Google and all the others.

I've been using DuckDuckGo since, at least 2010, maybe earlier. If its results aren't up to snuff, I'm not aware of that because they're what I'm used to. I fall through to Google ( !g) if I think there might be more out there. The bang commands are so good. I use DDG as my main search in my search bar and then I can use the bang commands to get to whatever specialized search I want from there. It's a meta-search-engine.

I am a long time DuckDuckGo user. I came for privacy and stayed because of the features.

Self-hosted Searxng. It's shared to multiple people which kills a lot of the usefulness in Google or others trying to track my instance.

I've been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for the past couple of years. I occasionally fall back to Google.

DuckDuckGo. Google if DDG isn't cutting it.

I use DuckDuckGo, but mostly as a "terminal to the internet". In a few keystrokes i've opened a new tab, navigated to the homepage (https://start.duckduckgo.com/), then used a Bang to do a direct search inside the particular site or thing i need. For many things specially tech questions i do fall back to Google though

DuckDuckGo, but mostly because of the !bangs. I do 90% of my searches through StartPage (!s), and the rest directly on a few websites (Wikipedia, YouTube, Arch wiki...).

Duck Duck Go is the only search engine I use. Switched away from Google for privacy reasons and haven't missed it a bit.

@SemioticStandard Kagi. I used DDG for a long time, and Kagi is strictly better. Specifically, it’s very snappy and I trust the privacy guarantees even more since I’m a paying customer.

They're all garbage. Content farms and SEO nonsense has been flooding search engines with useless garbage for years. Either that or pages that simply copy forum threads over and over and over so you get a whole results page of what appears to be different sites, but are all a copy of the same forum thread from 2007. Or they grab your search string and then you have a page that looks like it's exactly what you need, only to find out it's scammy bullshit. But AI is making that whole problem exponentially worse.

I've tried DDG many many times over the years. Sometimes it's ok. But overall, most of the results i get just aren't relevant, and it seems like over the last year or two DDG's results have gotten way worse. I always end up back on Google. As crappy as Google is, the results still end up being more relevant overall.

Google, duck duck go when I don't want to see ads for days based on what I'm searching, Bing and Perplexity when I want to avoid doing a series of searches to learn something.

Are you using DDG in addition to Kagi because of Kagi's limited number of searches per month, or because DDG does something better?

I'm a bit conflicted about Kagi because $5/month is a plausible price, but the limited number of searches seems like it would add an extra step of, "Do I want to use my limited search resource on this search?" to every search, which is an unwanted extra bit of friction.

I use DuckDuckGo. Including using their browser on iOS and windows.

Thanks for making me aware of Kagi, I've been trialing it and getting decent results is a breath of fresh air in a world of blogspam and LLM garbage.

I've been using Ecosia for a while and liking it. I think the results are usually better than Google and the image search is way more useful, still gives you direct links to the image files. Though most importantly I like planting trees.

Duck Duck Go too

Kagi on iOS and Mac. DDG w/Google on Android because my preferred Android browser, Vivaldi, doesn't offer Kagi. Anyone know how to default Vivaldi to Kagi?

duck duck go on firefox.

I use my selfhosted Whoogle instance for search

I'm still looking for a search engine that doesn't use data from my IP address to provide targeted results. In the meantime, I've gone back and forth between using SearXNG instances and using Startpage, but there's really not a decent search engine in existence, from what I can tell.

DuckDuckGo for me personally.

DuckDuckGo for general searches
Google for image searches
Google maps for local businesses (including their website)
BingGPT for simple research answers (e.g. What door closers will fit on a Norton 1600 bolt pattern?)