DuckDuckGo. I can't live without !bangs.

Kagi. Yes, it's paid and the pricing structure is really meh, but:

• Actual privacy
• No BS like with DDG
• AI features (like a "quick answer" feature that's really useful)
• Has its own index along with others
• Search results are great, probably better than DDG's
• "Lenses" (basically narrow results by a set of sites)
• Devs are pretty cool

DuckDuckGo, but I've been testing Qwant (also privacy focused) lately as well.

SearX-ng

Duck duck go first, and if results are shit, I default back to google

Duckduckgo for the most part, especially if I already know where I want to get to. Google as a backup like others are saying.

Startpage. It uses Googles results, but you will not get tracked that much

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.

Duck Duck Go. It just works for me. I've never had a problem with it's results.

DuckDuckGo

I also use Firefox search bookmarks for searching specific sites.

Search Bookmark: You prepare the URL with a %s placeholder and give the bookmark a tag, and you can type tag searchterm and it'll open it.

I'm using it for opening word definitions, word translations, searching reference documentation, searching specific platforms/websites/media types, etc.

Most small search engines use bing results which are a hit or miss compared to Google.

Startpage is the only privacy focused one I found that uses Google search results. The UI is fine for the most part, except the image search maybe.

Edit: typo

I hate adds. I was using Neeva. Just switched to Kagi. After nearly 3 weeks, it looks like 300 searches/month will work for me. So $5 a month is fine.

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.

DDG first, Google if that fails and I think the query should have gotten good results, Bing Chat if I'm still really not sure about a topic or if I want some of its summarization (or I'm just feeling lazy).

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo. I wanted something privacy-respecting, but Startpage was blocked in my country and SearX had problems with my language. Anyway I've heard an advertising company bought Starpage so I wont use it. Also bang shortcuts are great!

(Also is it just me or DDG doesn't approve new bangs now?)

Just Google, unless I'm looking to pirate something. Then I use Yandex.

duckduckgo primarily, but have been starting to dabble with a self hosted Whoogle.

Google, because of inertia and not being given a good reason to switch.

I used DuckDuckGo for years but I recently decided to make my own minimalist frontend to Bing API + Brave API and I added bangs of course.

Duckduckgo, works like I want it to and it's not Google. Never had a problem with its search results either. Tried several others as well including searx and ecosia but I found their image search inferior to ddg's.

Ecosia on my tablet because of nice integrated browser and DuckDuck+Firefox on the PC

Am also checking out Brave on PC at the moment

I find Ecosia's results to be the better than other privacy-focused search engines, sometimes even better than Google. It struggles with searches in Turkish tho.

Another DuckDuckGo user here. I really like it but wish I could use boolean with it.

I use Brave Search. wAs going to switch to Neeva but they are shutting down now.

DDG, it works well enough for me, and not that I got used to bangs I cannot let go of them

Google. Sue me, I really only care about results when it comes to search. It's mostly just Google and Bing actually providing results and Google's are better.