I’ve already moved my email/drive/that stuff over to Proton last year, (at least, what I can. It’s really difficult to redirect decades of different websites being given the same email addresses. All my gmails redirect to my proton mail. I’ve totally left the Google ecosystem for things besides mail & search.)
But I’ve still been using Google search (-AI), because previously in my experience it just simply has more content than other search engines I’ve tried and I also really appreciate Google Scholar & the integration with Google Maps. Granted I haven’t tried another search engine in years.
Can anyone make any recommendations of another search engine that actually respects privacy and isn’t using AI, but also actually has as wide of a range of results, features, and integrations as Google search?
I mostly stick with Brave Search because I want to support it, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t have some pretty bad gaps. Regular search can be decent enough, even though they’re not exactly great, but image search is virtually useless.
Kagi isn’t one of the recommendations here, but I’ve had better results with it than with any other search engine I’ve ever used. I don’t love the idea of paying for search, and I wish their monetization model had a better middle ground, but as far as quality goes, Kagi has been hard to beat.
I second Kagi. I’ve been using it for the past couple of years, and it’s been worth the money to me. So much so that I have a subscription for myself and an additional family subscription that I pay for my sister, her husband, and their children. It gives much better results than DuckDuckGo and better results than Brave IMO, and it supports Privacy Pass.
I assume you’ve already read PGs recommendations (as @seize linked earlier), so here’s two recent threads about alternative privacy-oriented search engines, specifially PriEco and Hister (though I personally have experience with neither).
S Tier: Kagi supposedly, at least I’m told it’s very much worth the $5 a month.
A tier: Searxng, startpage
B tier: Brave
C Tier: Yandex, google without personalisation, targeted ads, AI, or search result history enabled
F Tier Duckduckgo. Sorry, I know you guys are legit, but your search results aren’t.
Others: Not particularly notable compared to these.
The problem is that AI is taking over the search results, so there’s increasingly more junk to filter through. Google is still the best from what I’ve seen. I like getting google results via searxng using the startpage source.
Definitely Kagi, for me the results are better than Google’s. Of the free ones, Brave is for general queries like movie titles, games, or news. Or public SearXNG instances, but the quality and stability aren’t great.
NoAI removes the built-in AI in DDG and some AI images. For complex technical search queries, 9/10 sites are still AI.
I find no search engine works well for everything so I just add multiple search engines to my browser so I can quickly and easily use whichever search engine I’d like by using shortcuts. If your browser doesn’t support that functionality you can use DuckDuckGo bangs or Brave bangs instead. Usually DuckDuckGo works fine but sometimes I’ll need to check Brave Search or Google instead.