I’m still trying to de-Google my life, little by little. I don’t trust Bing for similar reasons. DDG is feeling shady of late. What’s the search engine you all recommend that I can inject into my daily life? Is there perhaps a search engine that is focused on code, or have we just all moved on to AI for searching?
Edit: I meant to also express my frustration that most browsers do not let you select a “default search engine” that can be used in the address bar aside from 3-5 pre-chosen engines. Seems like 2023 we should be able to customize that to our own liking.
Edit 2: Thanks for the recommendation of Kagi. I’m going to roll with it for a while. I see they have an extension for Safari that allows them to hijack the address bar, which is just what I needed.
Meta search engines:
SearX
Open source, self hostable meta search engine.
SearXNG
Better version of SearX. A list of SearX and SearXNG instances is available at https://searx.space
Also meta search engines, but different:
DuckDuckGo
It’s very privacy friendly, but it gets all the search results from Microsoft’s Bing.
Startpage
Basically the same thing but it uses Google results. They are really focused on privacy too, they even are on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@StartpageSearch
They’re based in the EU (Netherlands) so they are also subject to the GDPR.
Independent:
Brave Search
They recently stopped using Google and Bing and created their own search index. It appears to be privacy friendly, but the company behind Brave is not ideal.
Mojeek
A small privacy focused search engine, that uses its own index. They’re also on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@Mojeek
Kagi
I’ve seen many many people recommend it, but I have never really used it myself. It’s not free, they charge $5/month for 300 searches and $10 for unlimited searches.