100% agreed.
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I observe poor results with any search engine I use, be it Google or Duckduckgo.
Perhaps Iām just bad at phrasing specific search queries. But Iām finding that anything I search for just returns the most popular nonsense sites. For instance, when I search for articles regarding a specific topic on an Android security feature, I get results from popular sites such as makeuseof or androidauthority, that doesnāt even mention the security feature I had searched for. The sites are completely irrelevant.
When I put some of the search keywords in quotes to mandate Google to actually show me results on the topic, the returned results are still popular garbage.
At this point Iām using an LLM that searches the web for me, returning an acceptable summary of the topic I input and gives me actual links to the sources it uses to generate each paragraph. It outputs far more specific and relevant results.
Potential FUD warning:
At this point I suspect, without objective evidence, that Google and Microsoft are almost abandoning their search engines in order to lure people into their AI products. A good way to start their mass-spying on citizens.
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This is a known problem that everyone is dealing with. There is a tsunami of AI generated copy cat content and the whole industry of search engine optimization that is behind this. There are articles in publications like The Verge and many other tech sites as well as academic papers on how this is happening. As much as I hate the direction Reddit is going in, lots of people talk about how Reddit is really the only way to get real answers because sites and forums like this one (Privacy Guides) will get replaced by engineered search results that will rank higher.
I have not used Kagi but perhaps they can do something about this because they are more nimble/agile due to their small size and people paying instead of the advertisers.
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Iāve been toying with the idea of signing up for Kagi for this reason. On the one hand, making an account for a search engine seems totally antithetical to the privacy I so value ā¦ yet on the other, I canāt deny that I want to support an actually sustainable, user-forward business model.
Havenāt signed up yet but have been debating doing so for several weeks.
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just use brave search with a goggle that removes all those seo spam sites. not perfect but does the job imo
At least with Brave Search forums includding Reddit are promoted and directly readable inside the search page itself.
I think duckduckgo is the best. It even provides anonymous chat on Chat GPT: DuckDuckGo AI Chat: anonymous access to popular chatbots
In any case, I think Google must be avoided at all cost for searches, but also for the rest (list of alternatives for each app, including seach engines are here: Free privacy alternatives to Google in 2025 - SavTips)
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I havenāt tried duckduckgo but StartPage gave me the same result as Google. Might test Brave soon and give it a deep dive research.
Me too ! I donāt miss Google, even if I make a lot of searches everyday.
Same.
DuckDuckGo is very great for me !!
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Iāll echo the same feeling that most people already did! I switched to DDG a couple years ago and never looked back. Results are great and I never found the need to switch to another search engine.
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Mullvad Leta seems to give good results, particularly when using Brave (which is weird because Google has better results than Brave in my experience). Itās a bit worse than Startpage (which has basically the exact same results as Google in my experience), but Startpage is very slow, so I primarily use Leta now.
For me, Brave is better than DDG, even Google.
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I am happy that someone mentions Leta because this has been bugging me for a while: I really like Mullvad and their products and i really want to like Leta. I have tried it several times and even kept it for a while after they made it the default search engine on MB. However, I am really not satisfied with the results, and it never seems to bring anything relevant. I switch back to DDG and immediately find what I need. Anyone else?
They canāt really do anything about it since itās the results they get from the Googleās Custom Search API, which isnāt that cheap either, for the scale of Mullvad:
$5 per 1000 queries means they spend this amount in a matter of minutes.
Probably Google is just screwing up the results for their āwhitelabelsā.
I personally prefer searx.is, it just proxies to multiple engines using tons of IPv6 in a /64 block so it doesnāt get rate limited.
I did use DDG for a long time and after that Brave an Start page, but now I only use an instance from SearX on https://searx.space/ for good results from several chosen SearchEngines in the settings and has handy cached pages links with the search results.
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For me itās the AI summaries most of all, I rarely look at the results these days because the summaries are so good.
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I have pivoted to a search-engine aggregator myself. I self-host my instance but you can also use a public instance as well.
They have a breakdown of the privacy/security here and you can also see the benefits of using the aggregator on a private instance here:
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Moved to Kagi and never regretted it. Its results are even better than google (most of the times). Kagi can find some useful obscure articles on the web that are hidden in google search results behind heaps and heaps of SEO articles. Quick answer feature works like magic
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