In my opinion, considering both usability and privacy:
- SearxNG/Searx (Selfhosted) +++++
- SearxNG (Trusted instances: searx.be, paulgo.io) ++++
- Brave Search +++
- DuckDuckGo +++
- Whoogle (Selfhosted) +++
- Kagi (credit card and name required) ++
- MetaGer ++
- Swisscows +
- StartPage +
- Qwant +
- Ecosia +
- Presearch +
- You . com +
- etools .ch ?
Avoid:
- Bing/Yahoo
- ¿Phind?
More info:
DuckDuckGo (DDG) has some bad results sometimes. I am ashamed (only a little) to admit that I sometimes use Google if I need better results or can’t find something on DDG.
Try Paulgo.io (instance of SearxNG)
DDG can sometimes miss something, but few times I tried Google it didn’t help.
After this post I tried SearX, and it actually delivered better results than DDG on one issue I had trouble with.