As asked.
I use brave search by default.
Not sure why are you being downvoted. Brave search is actually pretty good
Yeah, I believe that the common consensus here on Lemmy is that Brave is ran by an A-hole and shouldn’t be supported. Secondly it’s hated for injecting it’s own ads and tracking into things aswell as the whole crypto thing.
I don’t think this should be downvoted. Brave Search is one of the very few search engines that is building its own index.
DuckDuckGo and Startpage are both great, however DDG uses results from Bing and Startpage uses results from Google.
We need proper competition against these big tech giants, and Brave Search is one of the few alternatives which is attempting to provide it. Mojeek is another search engine which uses its own index.
I recommend startpage.com over duckduckgo. It provides at least the same privacy as DDG while having generally better results because it uses google’s results instead of bing’s.
Edit: The ultimate search engine though, as mentioned by macattack, is SearxNG because it combines privacy with every other search engine and even allows you to mix and match your result sources.
This was over 4 years ago now.
If you use your search engine of choice that isnt owned by an ad company (lol) there are a bunch of results for it.
Here’s one to get you started
My first choice is actually Kagi these days. I pay for my search provider to have some peace of mind that my search provider isn’t selling me.
I used to pay for kagi, but their CEO have some opinions that I absolutely hate about how to handle some issues, and this was a deal breaker for me. Nowadays I’m using searxng
They announced a few months ago that they would partner with Brave to surface Brave search results too. The CEO of Brave is known to be homophobic. People got mad, and Kagi’s response was that they are too small to be picky, and have to focus on search quality.
I got it not too long ago, and I love it. The results are good, and the features are what i wish all search engines had. Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.
In the meantime, everyone should check out their Small Web intiative. Gives you a random blog or small website. There’s some really good articles I would have never read otherwise.
Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.
Judging by their ethos so far, I don’t think that’s a goal. I’d almost say it’s a non-goal.
does kagi spit out location-relevant information? that’s something I’ve really missed on startpage, I like being able to just google “chinese food” and have the restaurants near me spit back out, and if a privacy-centered search engine can return a result comparable to something like google there that’d make me real happy
They use approximate network location for such requests, yes.
“chinese food” didn’t trigger it for me which is understandable since it’s a generic term, not a request to show chinese food restaurants near you but “chinese food near me” does show restaurants in my approximate vicinity as expected aswell as localised search results for tripadvisor.
In their privacy policy they claim that that’s explicitly the only time they use data that could be considered sensitive in a search request.
There is a map search mode that does surface location aware results, after explicitly getting your permission to get your location.
Kagi does not request location permission; it uses network location (IP geo lookup).
I have started using Yandex recently and so far, it is decent, but no different than DDG. The minor annoyance I have is that some links and text are in the Russian language.
Kagi
