Download of searxist on my phone that rotates instances to confuse fingerprinting.

Ironfox rotating DDG, Startpage, Searx and sometimes a fork of Chromite rotating 4get, Searx, etc.

I am interestwd in self-hosting Hister, to make my own results over time. I’d like to make privacy centric ones.

I use noai.duckduckgo.com I used startpage for a while but I kept having captcha pop ups when I’d use a vpn and I got sick of it. While I really wish DDG didn’t push AI as much as they do, it’s at least nice that they offer a completely AI free version too, I guess. There’s definite give and take with all of the search engines.

I use duckduckgo on Firefox and mullvad browser, I also use it on my phones, but in my ungoogled chromium I’m trying out startpage.

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ is a decent way of avoiding some ai generated junk.

Ultimately duckduckgo is the best.

Bing and Google are out for obvious reasons. Startpage kept asking me to prove I’m human. Qwant blocked me whenever I enabled a VPN with an exit in a region they couldn’t run ads to. Ecosia is a non-profit so I’d feel bad blocking ads, but I don’t want to see ads. Mojeek returned garbage results. Kagi is ridiculously overpriced and restrictive. Brave Search often didn’t return the results I was looking for. And SearXNG I don’t remember what the problem was.

Well, at risk of downvotes…

I know what your asking but tbh I generally don’t search, at least not like we used to. It’s weird to say that, like I’m making some claim to heightened purity or some bullshit but it’s not that at all. Search is just … noisy AF these days.

I actually find myself using fewer sources, more directly and own my terms.

Eg: For something like PubMed, I go to pubmed (or define a proper boolean PICO search in an indexing tool). Sci-hub is a good source too.

https://sci-hub.st/

Or I can hit the wikipedia API (or even better, self hosted kiwix) and find what I need.

https://kiwix.org/en/

Or, for known, commonly visited sites (like fan wikis), I use self-written tools.

There are plenty of sites have public facing, nicely formatted, JSON friendly results. Others are just clean to scrape. A recent discovery was Muvitimes (for getting movie times listings).

https://muvitimes.com/

These tools query my white listed sites to a particular depth, collect the results I need, and present them for review.

You can then cache the info locally to query against using something like Meilisearch.

https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch

There are other options too. Something like Scrapy can collect structured data and a Trafilatura-like extractor can remove menus, adverts, and repeated page content.

https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy

I’ve even use something like self hosted Perplexica. It can query SearXNG, Tavily, Exa or other sources.

https://github.com/kiranz/perplexica

Honestly, if it’s a quick throw away search, I’ll call my self hosted llm, get it to pull from Tavilly and give me the summary and citations. That’s been miles better than most other options for me but YMMV.

Finally, if you’re talking about random occasional searches on phone, when I can’t access my LAN, I don’t mind DDG-lite

https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite

Selfhosted SearXNG for everything.

I’ve been using degoog.org for a few months and frankly the experience has been flawless. I’m thinking of self-hosting it.

https://github.com/degoog-org/degoog

Normally I find what I search for

Yandex for reverse image search or piracy content

The noai DDG for everything else.

Unfortunately I have notice for the last couple of months that some simple things I can’t just find the answer and the shit AI suggestion baked in the google search is giving me better results and I don’t think that is the AI that got better.

Running all my queries through SearXNG in normal windows and DuckDuckGo in private ones.

DDG is my goto, I always have a SearXNG instance, but it’s relatively slow and runs into problems too frequently to be my goto

I’m a software engineer so I search quite a lot.

99% of my search is on duckduckgo and it provides me the best answers. Even if I’m using someone else’s device to show them something for example, and their default search engine is google, I will switch to ddg because it genuinely provides better answers.

google for porn. brave-search for everything else

Kagi.