Well here are 8 search engines that I know that I did something recently with[0]
1. DDG (Duckduckgo)
2. Kagi
3. Brave (Independent)
4. Ecosia (Looking to be independent with Qwant in future)
5. Startpage
6. Marginalia (Independent and creator is on HN)
7. Mojeek (Independent)
8. Yandex.ru (Russian, Independent)
I personally use DDG (Duckduckgo). I think its a decent option fwiw, yes I know it uses Bing internally but it works really great.
> Evil pays well.
It isn't that Evil pays well although one can say that but rather that, Short term profits seem to pay well.
Although Google now has a decent AI model, Their search engine which I don't use aside from some image search sometimes, is getting worse, (maybe because that somehow helps them short term) because fwiw, their stock price isn't really correlated anymore with how good their search is, because you can bet that if that was the case, Google would throw everything to become best search engine.
These corporations are so locked in/monopolistic that unless you change your search engine/(In case of Microsoft operating system), they don't really care about how much worse their product becomes and sometimes even if people stop using their product, short term, they still don't care.
Adding on to it, They use SerpAPI which (sort of) scrapes google and then they do their work on top and this is also how they allow your customizability features to be added too in search if i remember correctly.
Kagi is great if you need great customizability and filters and if you wish to support the future of Kagi/products like these.
And Duckduckgo is great if you need a Google alternative which "just works" without costing money* if you are frugal.
Either way, both options are good and its best to leave Google if/when possible.
The best feature of both of these and brave-search to some degree is that all three support bangs. !yt leads to youtube and !hn leads to hn.algolia.com :) and !sr and so so many more. Bangs might be the best feature that google users might be missing. It just saves so much time.
1. DDG (Duckduckgo) 2. Kagi 3. Brave (Independent) 4. Ecosia (Looking to be independent with Qwant in future) 5. Startpage 6. Marginalia (Independent and creator is on HN) 7. Mojeek (Independent) 8. Yandex.ru (Russian, Independent)
I personally use DDG (Duckduckgo). I think its a decent option fwiw, yes I know it uses Bing internally but it works really great.
> Evil pays well.
It isn't that Evil pays well although one can say that but rather that, Short term profits seem to pay well.
Although Google now has a decent AI model, Their search engine which I don't use aside from some image search sometimes, is getting worse, (maybe because that somehow helps them short term) because fwiw, their stock price isn't really correlated anymore with how good their search is, because you can bet that if that was the case, Google would throw everything to become best search engine.
These corporations are so locked in/monopolistic that unless you change your search engine/(In case of Microsoft operating system), they don't really care about how much worse their product becomes and sometimes even if people stop using their product, short term, they still don't care.
[0]: what I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47232986