4get, I self host an instance
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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Startpage (which is a proxy for bing, but... Yeah)
As much as I hate Microslop, I've been primarily using Bing because of the whole rewards thing they have. Although, I obviously wouldn't recommend using it and instead would recommend DuckDuckGo, Ecosia or OceanHero.
For those who haven't heard of OceanHero, their goal is somewhat similar to Ecosia but they work towards cleaning the Ocean.
duck duck go is like firefox for me. I use it currently but im sorta moving away from it. I don't really have a good ddg replacement though.
Not a traditional one, but https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/s/tvZQHU4Dbf. And if it doesn't show the results I want, I use Ecosia.
I switched from DuckDuckGo to Waterfox's paid search engine (https://search.waterfox.com/) because I wanted to send a few dollars per month to a Firefox fork. It uses Google's search index, so the results are good, and it has no AI-generated responses. I just want a Firefox fork to be financially sustainable, so I'm paying for it. I don't think it has any advantages over noai.duckduckgo.com, though.
I'll also check https://marginalia-search.com/ every once in a while, since I like the idea of an independent search engine with their own index. It also has some creative features around discovering small, related websites. Feels like an "early internet" search engine.
https://search.marginalia.nu/ is pretty awesome for getting human generated / small web content.
If I'm looking for people sharing my hyper-fixation https://aboutideasnow.com/ is excellent. https://searchmysite.net/ is a indieweb opti-in only tool with similar usecases but not much is there. Lemmy
https://www.mojeek.com/ I have as my default browser search to try to support as its the only real large index comparable to Google and Bing (DDG uses), but it falls short a lot.
DDG is my primary engine when I need something fast / the others don't work.
If I can't find it in the small web and regular search fails, I'll sometimes try the udm14 Google trick https://udm14.com/
After that its posting to the askfedi hashtag (or ask here)
DDG works 90% of the time but it does perform worse than Google sometimes
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I use DDG as well. Have for years now, it's actually gotten to the point where it gives similar if not better results than Google Search for me now.
NoAI DuckDuckGo (noai.duckduckgo.com)
it has decent enough results and disables the unwanted AI features (I don't want to prompt an LLM whenever I search something)
I am willing to switch to something else, right now DDG is good enough.
TIL about that option, thanks.
I'm using paid Kagi subscription, and it makes searching for stuff feel like it used to before Big Tech broke the internet. I can actually find what I'm looking for again.
The "SlopStop" feature is worth it alone, but I love how I can choose what types of results and sources to prioritize.
10/10 Highly recommended.
Qwant/Ecosia.
Used to use Kagi (paid search engine, if you don't know it) which was truly remarkable and well worth its cost, at least in my eyes. But, as a EU citizen, last year US shit show, made me realize I'd better rely less on US-based tech. So...
Agreed. If anyone knows about an EU (or allies) search engine with a business model that's not strictly based on advertising (topped up by grants perhaps), let us know.
I use Ecosia/Qwant for now.
Yeah I'm with Qwant for the moment.
I used to use Kagi.
I used to use DDG before that.
I don't really have any complaints about any of these.
I'm trying to get better at using bangs to search on the sites I'm specifically looking for.
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I've used DDG for the past 7 years or so. When ever I don't find what I'm looking for I just add !g to the search term and it Googles it for me.
DuckDuckGo.
Like others have said, there's really no getting around that Google has the best search engine from a functional standpoint. So I use DuckDuckGo for my personal reasons, but if I'm dissatisfied with the results, I will open up a "private" browser and do a Google search.
Kagi. I know it gets trash talked for several reasons, but I've used ecosia, duckduckgo, tried searxng, and now I’m back to Kagi. I just like it better all around.
It feels like spam to mention Kagi since it's all over the place (even on Hacker News), but I've been a subscriber since the beginning and it made me a "2x programmer" due to their good results.
If I had no money left, I would try SearXNG.
For programming questions why not use an LLM? The days of searching a specific problem are long done. LLM+Documentation is all you really need now days.
I learn a lot while I search. LLMs may or may not hallucinate, and I'm not learning.
Depends how you use LLMs. I didn't say use LLM to solve the problem, I have it breakdown the documentation and make it easier to read/provide examples of usage + explain the steps.
Stackoverflow also has incorrect answers always marked as correct and isn't a great source to learn from, the best way to learn is just reading documentation and having breakpoints to read the data coming in.
I had to make a stackoverflow back in the day to correct so many incorrect answers.
I tired it. I'm not unintelligent, and it was far too complex of a setup for me. I did not care for it. But that's just me.
Been a Kagi user for about 6 months now. Not one negative thing to say. So refreshing to have good results again.
Kagi user since 2022, according to my account. I'll admit that I rarely ever cross-check with other search engines. I like their assistants too (they are basically re-selling access to all big LLMs in their Ultimate tier). But you don't really need those, what keeps me there are the good search results. (And the ability to easily block/raise whole domains on the results.)
No ai ddg has been a decent general search engine, but if I can't find something I'll us marginalia, mojeek, alltheinternet, and even yandex (if I'm desperate). For your research: InstallGentoo Wiki has a fairly comprehensive list of search engines albeit not the most up to date; Seirdy has a blog post reviewing many search engines including some more niche ones; and The Search Engine Map illustrates which engines use what index.
Kagi. Every once in a while I tried out Qwant, but it's just not there yet.
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Qwant on my computers and DDG on my mobile.
search.brave.com is pretty good, as is DuckDuckGo. But I've lately taken a liking to qwant.com. it's pretty good and not American.
I use Qwant and Ecosia.
Qwant and Ecosia are especially notable for their efforts to build an independent search index.
For those who don't know, most "independent" search engines, including DDG, still rely on Bing or Google results behind the scenes. They basically just act as a middleman by taking your query, forwarding it to one of those providers, and then returning the results to you. Some of them will attempt to reshuffle the order of those results to push the ones they think are best towards the top, but they're still fundamentally limited to what Google and Bing choose to give them.
Presently a lot of Qwant and Ecosia searches go through Bing, but they're collaborating to build an independent index which will allow them to become fully independent. I believe they're already serving a mix of results from Bing and their own index, with plans to bias more and more towards their index as it matures.
Kagi. Well worth the money.
DDG is good enough for me.
Startpage
The only independent search engines that support my native Japanese are Google, Bing, Brave, and Yep.
Of these, I generally search using Brave, and if I'm not satisfied with the results, I search again using DuckDuckGo.
I don't use Yep because of its strict bot restrictions.
Also, on the rare occasions when I need to do an exact match or a search using site:, for some reason, Brave and DuckDuckGo are useless, so I reluctantly use Google, which is a shame.
As someone living in Japan, I do not recommend QWant, which is recommended in this comment section.
As I've commented before, this is because the service geoblocks countries that have non-Western languages as their official languages.
I'm brazilian, our official language is Portuguese, and Qwant is not available here either. It seems they don't understand that people can speak two or more languages? They could just put an "English-only results" warning, but ok.
same for korea, qwant used to work but they seemed to have blocked access around 2023 or so
As someone studying Japanese, oooo that's awesome I gotta check them out! :D
If I had the money, I would at the very least try Kagi, but for now I'm just surfing with DuckDuckGo using their "noai(dot)duckduckgo(dot)com" link. Auto turns off their dumb "duck ai" nonsense and using their filters to try and hide genAI images.
I also looked it up because I was curious and if the source is correct, I learned that the "noai" part of that link is a subdomain.
I used ddg and startpage, they are both great. Although I slightly perfer ddg, but stays with startpage because it is european.
I also turn on ads to support them. However, now I have more money but less time to scroll pass all these ads, I switched to kagi, which is ad-free and fast. The price is not cheap and they are not based in Europe (they are registered in the U.S. with employees all over the world, which is technically better than U.S. centric ddg), however there is no alternatives that I am aware of.
i used to use duckduckgo, still sometimes do. but i switched to qwant and i think i like it better
Duck no AI version
I use DDG on everything, even the work PC. It works well enough for my purposes. I don’t even hate duck.ai and it can be useful, but I’ll double check anything I take from it.
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searxng (self hosted). But I understand not everyone can host something. There are public instances out there as well.
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