What do you think about Ecosia, Qwant, Kagi, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Mullvad Leta?
I use Brave and have for years (DuckDuckGo on iOS). The only thing I have ever felt the need to use Google for was images. I think almost everyone could switch to Brave and average users would be unaffected.
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The thing is, there are ads in search results on both Brave and DuckDuckGo, and Iāve heard the results are often irrelevant, unlike Kagi, which many people are talking about now. Or can you find everything you need with the right query on both Brave and Duck? But in theory, you canāt avoid ads, and without experience, you might end up on ad sites and waste your time. The first 3 sites could be ads.
you can opt out of ads in Duck for free. And opt out in Brave with Brave premium.
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Did you ditch ads on DuckDuckGo or Brave? Or is it more about typing the right queries to bypass ads and get relevant results? After all, saving time with a search engine that has no ads could be substantial.
Sadly, I am going with Google most of the time. My primary engine is Brave, but it fails miserably.
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I used to use Brave but since theyāve added the AI garbage Iāve had to switch to DuckDuckGo. DDG AI is less intrusive, less frequent, and can be disabled without cookies. Neither Brave or DDG gave great results so I sometimes use Google.
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Searxng on Brave desktop and Vanadium mobile. DDG on Mullvad Browser.
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I use an instance from SearX on https://searx.space/ for good results from several chosen SearchEngines in the settings and it has handy cached pages links with the search results.
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Ddg is my main for a few years already. #1 reason is their ai can be turned off, and Iām not being bombarded with fire hydrant captcha since Iām 99% of the time on vpn. Google, brave doesnāt like me being on vpn.
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I use Startpage.com, and am quiet happy with the results.
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Brave Premium.
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Startpage is good, but keep in mind that theyāve included a Tracking link in the shopping section (which they refer to as āAdsā), And if I remember correctly some links in the results arenāt always clean.
Nothing to worry about excessively, but definitely something to consider 
You could use SearXNG and get Google results from there.
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I have been using DDG as my main search engine for years, and Iām pretty happy with it. My 2nd alternative is Brave search, which is pretty good, but I still prefer DDG. Especially on Mobile. Frequently Brave on mobile makes me go through a āprove youāre a real personā verification test, probably because I use a VPN.
Google is not what it used to be.
I rarely use Google. And when I do, itās not linked to my account, or any account. I am surprised that with vastly reported enshittification of Google, people are still happy with it. Because even if you donāt care about privacy, you must have noticed how bad search results are on Google and YouTube.
YouTube Search sucks too
Every time I search for X on YouTube, it always suggests to me videos that have nothing to do with it, which is very frustrating. For e.g., if I search for āFirefox group tabsā on YouTube, many of the results will be cooking videos, or videos about a TV show, simply because I watched content related to those topics in the past, when it has nothing to do with what I am looking for at the moment.
I also remember a time when if you remember you watched a video about a specific topic years or months ago, and you search for it in your watch history, YouTube will be able to pull it out. But now, the results are awful.
YouTube doesnāt remember anything from your history. For e.g., if I know I watched the music video of a Katy Perry song years ago, but I donāt remember the title, I should be able to see all the Kerry Perry songs Iāve listened to if I search for Katy Perry in my YouTube history. But the results donāt show that at all.
Anyway, enough about Google and YT.
DDG is my default engine, but I have big issues with it.
1) DDG prioritizes articles from MSN that are actually articles from other websites.
This has Bing/Microsoft written all over it, and I donāt like it. If an article is originally from the Hollywood Reporter, I want to read it on their website, not MSN.
2) DDG geo-locks your results for certain countries.
For e.g., if you have a UK IP address and search on DDG, your results will be locked to that country. I donāt know why that is, but I suspect that DDG was paid to lock UK users.
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There are already threads on this topic.
I personally use DuckDuckGo and I am very happy with the results and features (bangs, Apple Maps, units converters, AI Assistant, duck.ai, the options in the images section, news feed, videos, sorting options, Wikipedia previews, etc).
More importantly, it gives the option to specify the language in certain countries : USA (en) or USA(ES),Canada, Belgium, India, Indonesia, Switzerland, Spain, Israel, etc). Brave search does not so I simply canāt use it 
The feature set is amazing for me and I would not want to use anything else. And I believe it is quite privacy preserving even though it had a few scandals. It is still the default even on Tor.
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Great to see others using SearXNG as well.
I run a self-hosted instance. When using something like Google through SearXNG, this would share my IP w/ Google still, however I went through the privacy policies of the available options and only utilize options that do not capture/track IP address et al. Mojeek and MulvadLeta are two examples.
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I didnāt know that, but I donāt use the shopping page at all. I also block every ad and/or tracking link and parameters, so I guess it would be okay?
Iām a Tor Browser desktop user. I find Brave is unusable. Hitting ENTER creates a newline inside the text box instead of starting the search I want, its interface (when I disable JavaScript) is a set of invisible buttons that I need to treasure hunt for, its AI (when I enable JavaScript) is too in-your-face, I often get stuck at its captcha screen (especially when I disable JavaScript), and results I seek in non-English languages are garbage.
This is true for DDG and Brave and may be true for all search engines with auto-complete or otherwise mess with the text box using JavaScript, but when I type into the text box I sometimes find I can no longer type and need to restart the web browser. Because of auto-complete, I also sometimes lose what I originally typed into the text box. These search engines think they know what I want but they often donāt, and takes control over my usage of them. Because of this kind of garbage and AI results forced upon users, I find disabling JavaScript to use search engines far more satisfying.
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