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.
I can see a usecase for where you don't know where to start or search with, and then verify with actual searches.
I recently used it to explain for a friend what is the difference between wheat and ale beer, and it gave a very good summary. With DDG I might not get a direct explanation and would need to read a few articles and then word them in a comprehensive way.
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.
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.
Mostly duck duck go.
Same here. I know a lot of folks don't like the results, but to be honest, I don't find Google any better these days.
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've been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for the past couple of years. I occasionally fall back to Google.
I run my own searx instance
As someone who's only recently heard of SearXNG, why searx and not SearXNG?
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.
I use DuckDuckGo. Including using their browser on iOS and windows.
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?)
Duck Duck Go is the only search engine I use. Switched away from Google for privacy reasons and haven't missed it a bit.
I use my selfhosted Whoogle instance for search
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.
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.
DuckDuckGo. Google if DDG isn't cutting it.
DDG for everyday usage. Sometimes I try searching the same things on google just to compare results. I've tried searxng instances on and off in the past but its rarely been reliable for me and self hosting isn't really an option for me.
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?
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...).
I switched to DDG almost entirely because of the !w bang — Google massively downranking/hiding Wikipedia links made it a lot less useful to me.
DuckDuckGo. Its results are much better than Google's in my experience. Whenever I Google something, all I get is a list of online stores I've never heard of, and they have nothing to do with my search input.
For me the main thing that makes me stick to DDG is the bangs - adding for example !wiki in the beginning of a search term to search directly in Wikipedia. It is a game changer, especially as I often need to search in specific sources for work. For example, !scholar for direct access to Google Scholar is great.
Whenever I think Google will provide better results it's as easy as !g - but I am also experiencing that the results are increasingly unhelpful (often geared towards shopping rather than information).
DuckDuckGo, and before that, I used ixquick(which is now StartPage).
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