I am kinda fed up off trying all these privacy focused search engines which provide lesser quality service. Here’s what I’ve tried so far:
- Duckduckgo: bad results when you search something that piracy related
- Searx: I’m not geeky enough to host mine own searx so I just jump from one instance to another and the uptimes have been bad.
- Startpage: Idk why it’s down most of the time
- Ecosia: Not very private, but I just tried it for the sake of it. It’s bad when it comes to the results.
Honestly I feel Brave search is the best when it comes to results. But the sketchy practices kept me away from it. Kagi is paid so I haven’t tried it.
What have you been using?
after a similar path that you took, I now use Metager.org, a privacy respecting meta search engine. You pay for your search requests, but it’s very, very cheap since it is run by a nonprofit (around a eurocent/search depending on settings). They integrate a lot of smaller search indexes, and you can choose to integrate braves and googles index if you wish. You can blacklist webpages too, and the source is FOSS.