I am trying to move away from Google due to the excessive ads and tracking, and also because it is known that some results are "too personalized", so biased. I have been playing with various alternatives; it seems that DuckDuckGo is the most popular privacy focused search engine but I tried it for a week and it was really poor in terms of results quality. StartPage is better because of the Google results but I've read not so good things about the company behind it. Ecosia not very good in terms of results either. At the moment I am testing Kagi, which is ad free but it will be paid with a monthly fee when out of beta. It's not bad actually. It seems to offer better results than DDG for example and supports the same bangs. Another one I am playing with is Whoogle, which I have installed on one of my servers so I use it with a custom domain. This one is pretty good too, it returns Google results but completely anonymized and without any ads. The only thing I like more of Kagi compared to Whoogle is that it has some features similar to Google such as featured snippets, instant answers and something called "Lenses" that help specify the type of search. So I've been playing with these and others and can't decide what to replace Google with.
What do you use, if not Google, and why? Thanks.
What do you use, if not Google, and why? Thanks.