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.

13 points
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DuckDuckGo. I can’t live without !bangs.

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3 points

Do you mean like !google or !amazon ? I use ddg. Just making sure I know what you mean

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1 point

yup. or rather their short form, !g and !a in your example, because no one’s got time to type out the entire names (:

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10 points

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
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3 points

I didn’t know it was privacy focused or that they were building their own index, that’s really cool. Do you think it’s worth the money?

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3 points

It’s only a few bucks a month. I think so.

The only thing I don’t like is needing to be logged in to search. That always feels like a huge invasion of privacy. The at least claim that they don’t log search contents though

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1 point

Bit biased cause I’ve had it for a while and have a ‘legacy plan’. But even without that, absolutely.

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3 points
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For some reason the thought of a paid search engine has never even crossed by mind before. I’ve been using DDG but this has peaked my curiosity. Thank you.

Edit: The pricing is… very… meh.

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6 points
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Deleted by creator
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4 points

So you’re basically paying for a proxy for Google and Bing search?

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2 points

It is very meh. But I think if you’re able to, it’s well worth the price. Just don’t get the standard plan. That one is god awful.

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1 point

It’s so worth it.

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2 points

I want to give it a try but it’s hard to justify the cost with limited searches. I don’t want to have to keep track of how many times I’ve searched or second guess if I “really need to search for that”.

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2 points

Love Kagi. I switched and never had any reason to use Google again. Its that good.

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1 point

I’ve been using Kagi for a few months now and I love it. When I think about how much of my life revolves around accurate information, the price is negligible.

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1 point

I was using DuckDuckGo and it was giving me pretty ‘eh’ results, only marginally better than google on the surface level, but both weren’t really usable for deep older searches. (and ddg starting to add sus ads/promoted) Brave is better, but Kagi has been fantastic when I’ve really needed to find something specific, technical, or very old. I think the best way to come about the pricing structure and limited search results is that I think it’s not supposed to be your only search engine from then on. There are times when you need what kagi gives in terms of producing quality and relevant results, and times you just wanna search “[company name] reviews/is a scam?” that using kagi wouldn’t serve you better than anything else, so it’s more of a tool that you bring out when you aren’t finding what you need with free search engines. On it’s own page it doesn’t try and oversell you on it, they admit that the majority of people don’t need paid search most of the time.

I haven’t approached if it’s an early netflix thing where you could split the bill with others for one login/family plan, that might make it more feasible.

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1 point

Kagi is absolutely wonderful. Highly recommend giving it ago. Gives me better results than google while having a fair privacy policy

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

Huh. I hadn’t heard of this one before, but I think I’m going to have to try it out.

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9 points

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

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8 points

SearX-ng

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1 point

It’s not comparable in quality at all…

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4 points

It can literally use any search engine you think of as a backend, so its strictly higher quality? Unless thats what you meant

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4 points

Isn’t that hard to determine without specifying which engines are used in your chosen instance? Searx/Searng has provided superior results for me using a combination of engines compared to anything provided by any of the alternatives by themselves.

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7 points

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

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