Best search engine alternatives to Google?
I find Google amazing for some kinds of queries, such as directly answering simple factual questions or finding content within a defined domain.
However, for a lot of things it's quite bad. If I want to find a good website for some use-case (as opposed to directly finding information inside a page), or if I want anything where there might be a commercial interest in ~~lying~~ advertising to me, Google is truly awful.
It's also, obviously, very bad for privacy.
Surely there are a bunch of interesting new search engines popping up given the recent deep learning explosion? What interesting alternatives have you discovered?
I switched over to https://kagi.com a while ago and never use Google search anymore.
Been using Brave Search since it was public, it's improved a lot since. I also really like Duckduckgo and I use it on mobile, but Brave Search indexes their own sites rather than being a meta search engine, like how ddg uses Bing results. Nothing wrong with meta search engines though, I just personally prefer the way Brave does it.
I've been paying for kagi for a while now and am pretty happy with it. Switched from DuckDuckGo.
I've been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine however I do find myself adding the "!g" bang a lot. It's hard to escape the google grasp.
Kagi is pretty good, but as someone living in a 3rd world country, it is too expensive. They say 300 queries/month is enough for almost everyone, but I've almost reached that amount in just a few days. And few cents per query adds up when I do multiple searches per topic, times ten for currency weakness.
AI search engines like perplexity.ai are too slow, and I end up clicking the referenced links anyway.
Once my Kagi credits are used up, I'll go back to DDG, which has better results than google in my experience. Though reddit being gone makes it hard to tell rn.
I use DuckDuckGo, and contrary to other comments here I find the results far better than Google on the very rare occasions I have to use it
I've also programmed https://metaforecast.org, which aggregates over prediction platforms (Polymarket, Metaculus, Manifold Markets, etc.)
I think this is kind of an interesting project, though I suspect it's as bad or worse than google for privacy:
www.perplexity.ai
Kagi's great, when it did not get good result, neither did google.
Only that you have to keep a mental counter on the usage.
I was using Kagi, and while I paid for them for a good while, I switched to DDG because I just can’t afford to subscribe to so many things. It’s money well spent and I agree with and support their philosophy, but man, all these monthly things add up.
Kagi user here, very happy with them so far. I honestly use maybe a third of their features (lens and boost/block are great ones that I'm too lazy/forgetful to use).
They also recently announced search AI (I think powered by Anthropic over their index) and API, which, as a developer, I also find useful.
Finally, the vision and priorities they communicate are something I agree with.
All this makes it a nobrainer to pay for their service.
I am surprised no one has mentioned Ecosia yet.
I am a not a developer, so my use case is different but Ecosia.org returns good results almost all the time. Of not, I would use StartPage.
Yandex is the least censored. IMHO, it works like Google did in the 2000s. Yeah Russia bad, blah blah.
IMO brave is the best alternative search engine but it definitely show its limit with niche queries.
SearxNG. Happy user of an instance someone is hosting near me that is fast and reliable.
I've been increasingly using Ecosia for a while. They use Bing under the hood.
Brave, DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Mojeek (UK), Qwant (France)
Is there a reliable offline alternative to search?
you.com, drops you directly into a LLM response to your question, with search results on the right side.
webcrawler.com
Going on four years now. Reminds me of how Google used to be, 15 years ago.