I have switched many times over the years and nothing has ever come close to google search. However, due to the recent massive decline in google search quality I am trying out kagi, with actually great success. I am still debating if I should pay for access once my trial ends, but more for budget reasons than for quality reasons. If it were free, I would not hesitate to switch.

I have been using duckduckgo. I personally think it's pretty good. So much so, that I think I have used it for 10 years now.

Kagi! Worth every penny of the subscription. The emphasis on privacy is a big deal for me but the killer feature is the ability to customize results. I have sites I personally like/trust towards the top and have an ever growing blacklist of sites that don't get shown at all. No more pinterest, spruce, or other seo spam sites!

Kagi is great

Browser: Firefox because I can download its source code, use it, inspect, modify and share. All of these 4 freedoms make Firefox free, as in freedom. ~~Brave is non-free (closed source and not contributing to software freedom)~~.

I use Qwant (unfortunately, it only works in the EU) and site-local search (Wikipedia, ArchWiki, etc.)

All web search engines are crap, honestly. Maybe Kagi makes better, idk.

EDIT: Brave is free, apparently.

Your question seems to be confusing between browser and search engine. These are two separate pieces of software.

But to answer both:

• Browser: Firefox. Google has demonstrated clearly that they cannot be trusted as the sole owner of the web which is what is about to happen as Chromium (which Brave is based on) fully takes over. Mozilla (makers of Firefox) is the last holdout. If you care, this is case in point about how Google having a monopoly on browsers will kill the free web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity.
• Search engine: Another +1 for Kagi. It has completely replaced Google for me.

I personally use Ecosia, it's got a pretty decent privacy policy (esp compared to google/microsoft) and it uses Bing's index so the results are pretty good. The main selling point is they use 100% of their profits for planting trees. The quality of the results is 99% of the time fine but if I ever get something I can't find (or if I'm doing an image search) you can just add #g to your search to search google.

It's overall a pretty good search engine by itself, but the fact it plants trees pushes it leagues ahead of the others for me

SearXNG. It'll search all the other engines for you, in a privacy preserving way.

I use startpage which is a google proxy. So, it does what duckduckgo does with bing but with google instead. Searx is also a great option. Neither have their own crawler though

As for the brave engine there's nothing inherently wrong with it. In fact, I'd argue it's much safer than google, bing, or the proxies of each. While proxying you can still be fingerprinted. With brave only brave could do that and I trust them not to more than most.

You should be cautious though, as brave has had some privacy issues before injecting affiliate links which would track you when going to ecommerce sites.

Of course, the brave CEO is a piece of shit though. Full on covid conspiracy lab made Fauci plandemic ivermectin type stuff, believes that gay marriage should be illegal while donating to anti-gay orgs, and otherwise uses his position to further far right ideas. He also tries to fund weird micro nation projects with the goal of creating anarcho-capitalist heavens in the ocean. Think bioshock, but crypto bro. All around weird guy

All this said, I'd still argue from a privacy perspective brave is a perfectly reasonable option. The company has one privacy controversy but that's better than the big two. I'll stick to startpage though for political reasons, until I find something with good enough results that's fully independent and moral. Currently looking at mojeek myself

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a while now, and while it works great for searches in English, I’ve had some problems with my native language (Finnish). However, with the use of bangs, this downside can be mitigated.

Search engine or browser? For browsers I’ll use Firefox, but if I’m logging into anything I’ll usually use Chrome or Safari. I’ll also use Tor browser sometimes.

On the search engine side, I’ll generally use DuckDuckGo but I’m trying out Kagi to see if it’s worth paying for.

Any love for qwant?

Askjeeves

I'm another Kagi fan - after customising it a little it's just so good, and I haven't even played with features like lenses.

I really like the custom bang searches (e.g. I could make !ks gravity search on simple Wikipedia), especially on mobile since Firefox Android doesn't support the normal browser quicksearches (where you set a keyword for each search).

I've been using Whoogle for a while now.

4get.ca, it's a metasearch engine, you can use it to get results from different search engines without trackers and anonymously

Google's localization is much better than any search engines I've tried.

For work I still use Google tbh. It's still really good for technical answers

For any given query, if you're not satisfied with the first results out of one search engine, try two competing ones. Next time you have a search, begin with whatever one did the best on your previous search. Iterate. Record and publish your results.

Folks were unsatisfied with AltaVista and Lycos; that's how Google won for a while. At one point, Yahoo stood for "You Always Have Other Options". You still do.

I switched to Brave Search after watching Techlore's video about it.