I’ll go first. I’ve used a lot of search engines, I used duckduckgo for quite some time but found their search results kinda bad. I’m currently using ecosia the search results are similar to ddg’s but at least I’m planting trees, so there’s that.
duckduckgo primarily, but have been starting to dabble with a self hosted Whoogle.
Duck duck go first, and if results are shit, I default back to google
I’ve been using presearch.com and and quite happy with the results it gives for any question. Yes, there are one or two sponsored links, but the rest consists of great results
Oh wow, I checked it and for people simply lurking by, you can click on a website icon and instantly go do the research on that website
For the moment I am using brave search not on brave browser but as a firefox add-on, a fine tuned searx.be and perplexity.ai, which isnt a search engine but a connected chatgpt ai with links in the answers.
SearX-NG, coming off DuckDuckGo it wasn’t a major change in the internal structure (the search gets relayed over to a larger search engine), but there’s no one company behind it like DDG. They’ve been working together with Microsoft on some rather sketchy things.
I would still love to self-host something decent (that doesn’t relay over to a company), but nothing like that exists as far as I know.
From what i know the exemption thing was only in the app and has been removed by now and so far the alternatives are… Not very Suitable for everyday use, at least for me.
I’ve been using SearXNG. It is a fork of SearX, a popular open source metasearch search engine. Basically SearX allows you to use multiple search engines for a search, and only the results are there, no ads. SearXNG changes the UI to be better, adds some other engines for a variety of things to search, like images. Currently I’m using ericafteric.top as my instance; it is the fastest US instance with search suggestions support since I can’t selfhost.
I run my own SearXNG instance too. I set it up to a Hetzner box, then blocked all ports from the firewall except on the Tailscale network. This means the machine which wants to use the search needs to be connected first to the same Tailscale network. It allows me to prevent being blocked by the search providers for too much traffic and is been working great. I just open http://SearXNG from my browser and start searching.
