this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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I live in a country which uses a language I don't speak but Google defaults to regional results in spite of my language being set to English. All other engines give me really poor results (not that Google was giving good ones, the image search has really gone to shit since they started populating it with AI stuff).

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I use Startpage, a privacy focused search engine which uses Google powerful search engine but without sending the actual data to them. The result are pretty good. You can change both the language and region in the settings. Bad part of Startpage is it is a for profit company (some advertising will be displayed using past search history only)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I recently tried Brave and Duckduckgo, but I always come back to Startpage. It's a little bit slow but search result more satisfied for me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I wish I used DuckDuckGo more, but lately Google has been the default...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I rotate between a handful of public SearX/SearXNG instances. I used to use Duckduckgo but after learning about the deal they had with Microsoft I completely stopped trusting them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

DuckDuckGo always

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

DDG almost 100% of the time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'll be that weird guy using Bing! Ive signed up for Bing Rewards so I at least get some payment for the data they're collecting. Also the Bing ChatGPT feature is interesting and useful at times.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I use it too for the rewards. I had the exact same thought as you--at least they pay me for collecting data.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I'm using Startpage and it's been mostly fine. The biggest issue is that the "nested" results that come from Google (e.g. a forum and related posts) don't show in Startpage, it will only show the main result.

I really wanted to use something like SearXNG, but I get basically zero results whenever I use an instance, no idea if I'm missing something in how they work.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I have been using brave search for a few weeks, and the results seem pretty good so far.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I want to like SearX, but I just haven't gotten any great results from it so far, and I'm not really impressed by anything that just spits out Bing results (looking at you DDG).
you.com gives excellent results, but I'm not sure how much I should be trusting them.
Brave search has gotten MUCH better and I use that pretty on the daily now. I keep seeing good things about Kagi from our Lemmy friends here, thinking I should give that a shot

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I just recently started using Startpage. The results to me so far seem pretty good but im in a country where I speak the language. And I like that it doesn't save my searches. For that I use DDG.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

When I setup a new browser, I always delete all the default search engines and install DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant and Startpage. If I'm looking for accurate results, I always use 2 or 3 of these. I can't say I consistently get better results using one or the other.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I'm still sticking with google. I check duckduckgo occasionally but always find it to be subpar.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I hop between Brave search, Startpage and DuckDuckGo depending on the results I get.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I use the following search engines listed by priority:

  • Brave
  • DuckDuckGo
  • Google / Bing

Sometimes the first two just don't have the right results.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ecosia. It's not a great search engine, but it's good enough most of the time, and it plants trees.

It doesn't necessarily return the results I want, though. Possibly because it isn't tailored to me like Google is (thanks, data-scraping!) so sometimes I use Google if I want a search engine to use context.

For example, I couldn't remember the name of the show 'Voltron'. If I search Ecosia for 'cartoon show giant robots made of smaller robots' then I get pictures, or snippets of the phrase 'giant robot' or 'show giant' or whatever, literally looking for it. But then I swap to Google and it uses context to show me Voltron stuff among the results so I can be like YEAH THAT'S IT NOW I can make my extremely topical joke to my friend, thanks

I hear good thinks about Duck Duck Go, it may even use Google's search indexing but it protects your privacy and doesn't track what you're searching. Which is both 'bad' (your results are harder to narrow down obscure searches) and good (general searches aren't contaminated by obscure guesses).

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

DDG all the way

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I use duckduckgo. One thing I notice about the google language is that my phone has french as the os language so google will be in french but then I go to a computer that has english as it's language, sign in and google will be in french (even though my account is set to english). So check your OS and browser language settings on all devices you signed in on.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Startpage primarily because I was told that the Google results are better than DuckDuckGo but I never noticed any big difference except that Startpage has deactivated NSFW content by default. DuckDuckGo feels a little bit snappier and less cluttered tho.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Been very happy with DuckDuckGo for a while now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I was using Brave until last month. They did something and now image search redirects to Google/Bing so might as well use Google I guess...

Oh and also the normal search results got really bad all of a sudden.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Brave search. The results have been better for me than most of the major players, summarizer comes in handy, and the discussions section showing forum posts on the searched for topic + top comment is useful. No native image section, but I work around that by !s bang to search on startpage when I need images. And yes, it has bangs, just like DDG.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I use Bing now due to Microsoft Rewards and Bing AI

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Brave search but am looking for something else now that image search has been removed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

actually google.
all other search engines give worse results, buggy (I'm looking at you, searx; it fails very frequently), or just have worse ui/ux

but yeah i agree, regional bs is an issue. with region set to Ukraine and searching in English/Ukrainian i get a lot of russian websites for some reason.
I can't stand russian and i fully blocked the whole .ru/.su tld. They are of no use to me anyway.
google still suggests them even with language filters (lang:...)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Selfhosted SearxNG with Google and duckduckgo

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Would https://google.com/ncr help you? It's google "no country redirect"

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