I am sure there is a good reason for this. I am looking for alternatives to google, and these to be the ones that pop-up most often.
RESOLVED: I used up my 100 searches in kagi pretty quickly, and the experience was really nice. I am quite anti-subscription, so I won’t continue using it. I eliminated brave from my search due to the crypto stuff and whatnot. I am now using mojeek, which gave me better results over DDG when searching for niche stuff. Also I like mojeeks interface a lot more.
If you have the ability to selfhost then searxng is also a very good option.
Why does no one mention Qwant, Mojeek, or Ecosia? Those are pretty good
You may want to reconsider your stance on subscriptions if you’re looking to degoogle and go towards more privacy. General stance in the community (if I remember right) is that if you’re not paying for the product, YOU are the product. Meaning they will likely be sharing more information, even if inadvertently through ad networks and whatnot.
If it is on the internet, not self hosted, you are typically the product if you pay or do not pay.
de-googling is a process, it won’t be perfect for a long time. No matter what many comments say, just starting with one or two things is already huge.
Both DDG and Brave Search are already an improvement. Go with the choice that causes the least resistance and then keep improving from there, as long as it works for you.
Striving for ideological perfection is a dead-end.
Striving for ideological perfection is a dead-end.
You can strive for it, you just need to understand it’s a process that takes time and that there’s inevitably temporary consequences along the way
Brave is some Crypto-Bro stuff, i’d go with DDG or Kagi. At some point you could get a Junk-PC and run SearXNG on it
Brave is a crypto bro sham that blocks external ads just to insert their own
Meaning? Do they force you to use crypto services? In my time using them I have not encountered ads.
This answer makes this post feel less like a question and more like an ad.
No, and you can turn them off in settings. I use brave browser. No one is perfect, you gotta pick and choose what is acceptable to you or not when getting into the prigsfy/security realm. If you try to find perfection, you won’t.
For search, I use kagi. I love it. Worth the couple of bucks a month IMO. Free to try with some amount of searches a month on the free plan so you can just go fuck around and see if it is worth it for you too
I haven’t heard of kagi, might try it out. Although it being paid might be a dealbreaker…
Remember if you are not paying with money, you are the product being sold.
Remember if you are paying with money, you are probably still also the product being sold.
This is at least the case for one company, see: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cM_l-T1N5rE
Sry for the yt link, video isn’t up on Peertube yet (they’ve uploaded before but not always so it may or may not end up there soon)
Sry for the yt link, video isn’t up on Peertube yet
You could always checkout invidious.io to find the video and link it here as well if you want to.
I switched to Kagi a few years ago and I’m not going back. It’s amazing how it’ll just give you the result with zero ads or SEO shit.
You can even downrank specific sites just for you (fuck Pinterest)
Fair reaction, but dont knock it til you try it
For me it’s mostly cause of this asshole.
They were also partly funded by Founders Fund, which is Peter Thiel’s VC firm.
Does mojeek have its own index? I see in preferences you can choose where you get results from and brave is one option selected by default.
Options like qwant, ddg, swisscow, etc are also available. Are those any good? Do they use their own indexes? I know ddg doesn’t.
If this is how they actively go against their own browser ethos, what makes you think they will stick to their search engine ethos.?
Removed by mod
I always recommend https://noai.duckduckgo.com/%s because I’m trying to find results without AI/LLM. Nearly all search engines, including Brave, have AI results as a default. Sure, I can disable the AI results in the engine’s settings but it’s reset the next time I open my browser.
I’ll share my unpopular stance. You can use Brave search from any browser, I use it with Librewolf. This way I get independent web index without any crypto-bro shit. So what is advantage over using DDG? Its that they actually have their own index so its not just a front for some megacorp.
When I was looking around for web search Kagi and Mojeek weren’t as good. Maybe that is changed now. What I do know is that Google that I have on my work machine doesn’t perform any better than Brave.
Waterfox is the AI-free way to go.
I prefer Startpage out of all of them, but lately been using Kagi’s APi along side my SearXNG instance and the experience has been quite enjoyable.
I do not want to be vilified for saying this, so I will echo what everyone else seems to be suggesting of DDG being a good degoogled search engine.
When I started to degoogle, personally do not remember what I was using DDG and ecosia probably. I hear ecosia has jumped into the AI game which I think is icky for what they are trying to do.
I later started getting into home labbing. I am in no way suggesting that you should jump into that right now, this is a rather expensive lifestyle, it starts with one project and you think oh fun what can I replace next? So the search engine I use now is searXNG, which I have set to pull from Bing, wikiepedia, and a bunch of smaller engines. I am just trying to say there are options for you to look into in the future. Not right now you are just getting out of the Google ecosystem
So the search engine I use now is searXNG
Ah you think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark.
Heh, just making a silly joke. As a home labber, I imagine you’re well across YaCy, so am just name dropping it for the newbies. Yacy, Hister etc etc.
Answering the OP -
Personally, I find myself either going directly to the sites I want, using RSS feeds or (gasp!) using my local LLM agents with MCP adapters, with something like Exa to fetch the info I want (or directly via PubMed etc).
(these are raw CLI; I need to wire this up to XMPP very soon so I have something that’s a little less “Haxor” for the rest of the family to use)
More and more, I am mirroring the stuff I need offline, so that I can point my pet clankers at my local files, Kiwix archives, Recoll etc and then just one-click them open.
I have heard of Yacy, do not know why I choose not to use it. Maybe tonight I will be doing another deep dive into it.
It’s sort of a pain in the ass…but worth a shot. Maybe.
I looked at it some more and thought yeah probably not.
+5 wisdom
