I’d recommend getting Kagi.com. It’s one of the best software investments I’ve recently made, it makes searching for technical questions so much better, because they have their own indexer with a pretty interresting philosophy behind it. I’ve been using it for a few months by now, and it has been awesome so far. I get way less results from random websites that are just framing clicks on any topic imaginable by raping SEO, and as an added bonus I can just send selected pages, such as Reddit, to the bottom of search results.
Plus, the fact that it’s paid, I don’t have to worry about how they are monetizing my data.
I am really convinced there is a Kagi marketing department dedicated to Lemmy. But if it really works that much better for you, that’s great.
But I wouldnt only bank on the logic “the fact that it’s paid, I don’t have to worry about how they are monetizing my data”. A lot of paid services still try to find ways for more money
While I did see Kagi recommended on Lemmy, I’ve made the switch because of a recommendation by my colleague at work (now that I thing about it, that would funnily probably be the case even if I was actually working for Kagi :D), and it has been a nice experience so far. Plus, we’ve just been talking about it today at the office, so I was in the mood of sharing :D But I haven’t done any actual search comparisons, so it may just be placebo. I’d probably say it’s caused by a lot people trying to be more privacy-centric here, and mostly deeply against large corporations, so the software recommendations tend to just turn into an echo-chamber.
As for the second point, yeah, I guess you are right, Brave Browser being one of the finest examples of it. But it’s a good reminder that I should do some research about the company and who’s behind it, just to avoid the same situation as with Brave, thanks for that.