Technology

I use the Librex instance running on my homelab.

DuckDuckGo, and before that, I used ixquick(which is now StartPage).

DuckDuckGo for general searches
Google for image searches
Google maps for local businesses (including their website)
BingGPT for simple research answers (e.g. What door closers will fit on a Norton 1600 bolt pattern?)

Currently DuckDuckGo, but I will switch to SearXNG because of this.

I typically use StartPage, sometimes DDG. Occasionally I pop in and check out how Brave Search is progressing, out of curiosity.

I would love to use Searx, but I've never found an instance where functionality wasn't breaking all the time or it just randomly goes offline. As much as I want to be, I've learned that I'm not much of a self-hoster. So, yeah, every time I try Searx, I wind up back at StartPage. If anyone has any solid, reliable instances they know of, I'd love to check them out.

DuckDuckGo here.

I'll give a search on Duck Duck Go, and if I can't find what I need then I'll use Google.

But at this point I'm using Google Bard and ChatGPT more and more, at least at work.

I exclusively use AltaVista.

I use DuckDuckGo. Including using their browser on iOS and windows.

Duck duck go. Google for maps

They're all garbage. Content farms and SEO nonsense has been flooding search engines with useless garbage for years. Either that or pages that simply copy forum threads over and over and over so you get a whole results page of what appears to be different sites, but are all a copy of the same forum thread from 2007. Or they grab your search string and then you have a page that looks like it's exactly what you need, only to find out it's scammy bullshit. But AI is making that whole problem exponentially worse.

I've tried DDG many many times over the years. Sometimes it's ok. But overall, most of the results i get just aren't relevant, and it seems like over the last year or two DDG's results have gotten way worse. I always end up back on Google. As crappy as Google is, the results still end up being more relevant overall.

I am a long time DuckDuckGo user. I came for privacy and stayed because of the features.

SearXNG, searches every search engine and regroups them in a single list, alongside the very powerful "bang" variant they use ("!!" is like "!" for ddg, and "!" is to only search with this search engine, ":en" is to choose a specific shortcode language.)

I use Ecosia. It works quite well, and if I ever need to search something on Google instead (like a coin flip/stock ticker) you can just do #g or #yt for Youtube They also plant trees and are carbon negative

Google. As much as I'd like to use other search engines, their search results are all severely lacking and not adequate for my needs (often pertaining to research) and they're generally not as great on the multilingual front or in searching pdfs.

I also have some keywords set up in my browser so I can directly search sites I use (e.g. Wikipedia).

I use DuckDuckGo, but mostly as a "terminal to the internet". In a few keystrokes i've opened a new tab, navigated to the homepage (https://start.duckduckgo.com/), then used a Bang to do a direct search inside the particular site or thing i need. For many things specially tech questions i do fall back to Google though