Technology

Results are very hit-and-miss, but if you're into the whole distributed search engine thing you should give Yacy a try. https://yacy.net/ I ran a node for a long time and as long as you keep feeding the index you usually get decent results for the things you search for often.

Brave search. The results have been better for me than most of the major players, summarizer comes in handy, and the discussions section showing forum posts on the searched for topic + top comment is useful. No native image section, but I work around that by !s bang to search on startpage when I need images. And yes, it has bangs, just like DDG.

I use ddg most of the time. It fits all my needs. Sometimes when it comes to very niche things or complicated things I use startpage or brave.

I want to like SearX, but I just haven't gotten any great results from it so far, and I'm not really impressed by anything that just spits out Bing results (looking at you DDG).
you.com gives excellent results, but I'm not sure how much I should be trusting them.
Brave search has gotten MUCH better and I use that pretty on the daily now. I keep seeing good things about Kagi from our Lemmy friends here, thinking I should give that a shot

Been very happy with DuckDuckGo for a while now.

I use Duckkduckgo, I'd like to use Kagi though, From my short experience, the results were excellent and I'd like to curate the websites I like and don't more as I think that would improve things the results even more.

I'll be that weird guy using Bing! Ive signed up for Bing Rewards so I at least get some payment for the data they're collecting. Also the Bing ChatGPT feature is interesting and useful at times.

Brave search. When I don't find something I try with google.

Most of the time brave search is good enough. But everyone searches for different things so idk.

I use Bing now due to Microsoft Rewards and Bing AI

I've ditched Google. I use Qwant for searching. It's about the same as Google in terms of results, I think.

I run my own SearXNG instance, which is a metasearch engine that shows results from a bunch of other search engines. I find it incredibly useful! It's very customizable as well

StartPage or DDG

I use duckduckgo. One thing I notice about the google language is that my phone has french as the os language so google will be in french but then I go to a computer that has english as it's language, sign in and google will be in french (even though my account is set to english). So check your OS and browser language settings on all devices you signed in on.

I use one of the searxng instances or startpage.com

I'm still sticking with google. I check duckduckgo occasionally but always find it to be subpar.

Mine... One of the SearXNG instances published at https://searx.space.

Searxng (searx.be) / startpage

I tried you.com for a long period of time. It has some nice ways to present content but overall I too often did not find what I was looking for so I switched back to startpage.com as unpersonalized version of Google.

I'm using Startpage.com (can set the location - I also have the problem that I use a VPN and keep getting not the language I want. IDK how to make it stick though), and Kagi paid for a bit now.

Selfhosted SearxNG with Google and duckduckgo

I just run a searxng instance for myself. Fetches from multiple sources.

I've heard good things about kagi, but it does require paying for (though you can try out a free tier to see if it'll work for you)

I have been using brave search for a few weeks, and the results seem pretty good so far.

Brave Search on all my personal devices, even though I'm getting worse results than up to a few months ago, so as much as it pains to admit it I sometimes use Google as a fallback (and the last time I actually used Google as my main search engine was back in 2012!). I probably should use metasearch engines more, though, but have been procrastinating learning how to effectively use them for a while now.

Aside from that, I have about a dozen sites saved with search keywords on Firefox (four of them are Wikipedia in different languages, though) that I use all the time.

Startpage primarily because I was told that the Google results are better than DuckDuckGo but I never noticed any big difference except that Startpage has deactivated NSFW content by default. DuckDuckGo feels a little bit snappier and less cluttered tho.