I used to run a private instance of SearXNG, but it wasn't for me. I don't really know exactly why.

I switched to Kagi now and I'm pretty happy with the results. However, there are some things to consider:

• Kagi costs money
• They claim to be privacy-friendly and that they don't build a profile of you
• There's no proof on that
• There's no private way to pay, credit / debit card only
• Like that, they could totally build a profile of you
• They're US-based, so what happens when one of the 3-letter-agencies asks them for user data?

Anyway. I'm trying to be positive and I really hope that I'm funding something good here. So far, I really like it.

I use DDG. I read here that start page had been taken over by an advertising company, and Brave always felt dodgy from day 1, weird crypto stuff ~~and I think the owners previous company may have sold users data~~.

I think DDG is the best we have right now.

I use DuckDuckGo at home, but at work it’s blocked. I’ve argued for it to be unblocked but to no avail. I use Startpage at work because it appears to have the same results as Google but also lets you view images anonymously when possible.

I've heard of Startpage (which appears to be a frontend for Google results), but I personally like Brave Search more (visually, also you have !bangs for quickly searching wikipedia, ddg or startpage when you need it). I heard ecosia should be private, buy I've been ciritical and didn't look into it yet, because its main focus appears to be planting trees.

Brave search because it is their search company that finds new ways to make users more anonymus, Brave is not a middle man for another company.

I don't recommend because they force users to verify when searching if Startpage detects a VPN or Tor.

Some will say SearX, a self hosted search engine, the issue with SearX is the search results can be irrelevent or something random. I support it but I don't use it due to not consistently being relevent to my search or not informative.

Searx/Whoogle. Both on farside.link.

Btw, you can do farside.link/whoogle/ in your bookmarks.

When it comes to search engines, I value not only privacy, but supporting independent indexes ans avoiding Google's monopoly.

Ddg is working in this aspect, so I consider them to be ok.

Kagi.

It depends on your goal.

If you just want privacy for your daily not-to-weird usage and ease in both in the sense of setting it up and in that of good results and that's it, DDG is probably fine for you.

I use Brave, simply because unlike most others, it has it's own crawler. For me it's results have been slightly better than DDG too, but I also hear people claim the opposite so I guess it really depends. DDG uses Bing's results, and many others are also more like privacy front-ends for Bing or Google. If you want to totaly leave Big Tech, be it to not help with their power or because of principle, that's likely the one that's the most easy with the best results that fits.

SearXNG is self hosted and less accurate, but the most privacy friendly and not attached to any company as you host your own instance, while with Brave you still rely on Brave's goodness. If you want total control, you want something like this.

I don't use anything else from Brave, and default search engines are easy to change, so I'm personally not too worried about Brave's power over me. I do preffer to stay away from Google and Microsoft, and only access them (prefferably trough privacy front-ends) if no other option works decent enough for me. I also prefer not to self-host due to the time and knowledge needed to do so securely. Well, I have knowledge, but I don't want to worry about those things for my peivaye stuff all the time. Hence the choice of Brave.

I host an instance of searxng and I am quite happy with it. It displays results of a combination of engines. If you want to spin up your own, I have a blog that explains how to do in basic steps : https://mustafacanyucel.com/blog/blog-13.html

Go to https://searx.space and enjoy (one of these instances is mine).

I believe the reason for ddg in tor use may be related to an announcement they made about having an onion address available. So your searches don't go through an exit node.

My memory may be failing here and I haven't tested it, but thought I'd mention that

Give Whoogle a try. Just choose an instance; or, you can combine it with Farside. This way it will choose the best instance for you.