I’ve seen a lot of discourse over which browsers we use and I myself have made the switch from brave to firefox. I still use brave as my search engine though, so… which do yall recommend? Is brave’s engine necessarily bad to use? I personally like its ui/theme.

  • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works
    352·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      14·
      2 years ago

      I’ve been paying for Kagi for a couple months now. Now that it’s $10 for unlimited searches I’ll probably keep it up for a while. I do tend to get really good results. Its the first thing on the chopping block next time I need to tighten my budget though.

      Before Kagi I was using DDG, but had to use bangs a lot because I couldn’t surface what I was looking for.

    • lars@lemmy.world
      81·
      2 years ago

      I’m liking all the comments saying that [even despite its strong decline in quality], Google’s results are still much better than others’. I’ve been moving around a lot to other search engines lately and thought I’ve been doing something wrong.

      • gr522x@lemmy.ml
        10·
        2 years ago

        Better to De-Google sooner rather than later imho and it’s fairly safe to assume corporate greed will continue to send it’s products and services deeper into the abyss. I think using alternatives now will make life easier in the future as Google becomes less useful with each passing day. Also, just using Google gives them access to personal data to harvest and ad revenue. I think we should try to be conscientious consumers whenever possible and use less evil alternatives. I don’t want to support Google’s enshitification of the Internet, censorship, anti-competitive practices, etc…

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 years ago

      Similar for me, there’s just absolutely no comparison to Google so far. DDG is the closest but the results are still a fair bit worse and importantly, I’ll always have to swap to Google for maps anyways as Apple Maps is just an insult to users.

    • jemikwa@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      A group of friends and I jumped into a family plan and it’s far more manageable. For 6, it’s $3/month/person or $36/year/person if the owner pays yearly.
      The value we’ve all gotten out of it is outstanding. Being able to push and pull certain websites in results is amazing in today’s era of AI generated website shit. And all of my technical searches have been 1000x better on Kagi than they have been on Google in recent years. Everyone in our group says the same thing, it’s that much better than what we’ve been enduring with Google.

  • raubarno@lemmy.ml
    232·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • noUsernamesLef7@infosec.pub
    233·
    2 years ago

    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!

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      5·
      2 years ago

      But doesn’t that naturally just recreate an even more personalised and hence affirming echo chamber the like of the algorithms on Google or Bing or so usually do?

      Granted, plenty Spam sites to exclude, but is it easy to keep it to just those?

      • noUsernamesLef7@infosec.pub
        3·
        2 years ago

        This is an interesting observation, not really something I have considered. The key difference here is that you are the one in control of those customizations. Whether the customizations are useful or harmful is entirely up to the user, Kagi just gives you the option.

        For me at least, the majority of my searches I just want the correct answer to a question or a link to a specific resource I’m looking for. I don’t really use it as a content discovery engine. Being able to prioritize sites that I have found through experience to have reliable results and exclude sites that are uninformative or irritating is valuable.

    • Z4rK@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Just the ability to replace items URLs in the result is such a great feature. I get rid of all Google / bing AMP stuff, reroute all Reddit answers to old.Reddit etc.

  • shrugal@lemm.ee
    14·
    2 years ago

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

  • sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    11·
    2 years ago

    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

      • sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Oh shit, hey! Been a bit since I’ve said this but I’m happy to answer. I’ll admit I don’t remember exactly where, but I had asked about a privacy respecting independant search engine in a few matrix chats and separately did a bit of searching on startpage. It’s likely one of those two places I first found it but word of mouth through matrix is what convinced me to use it

        I’ve been liking the service btw, I think you guys are doing something fantastic

    • Hal-5700X@lemmy.world
      26·
      2 years ago

      Of course, the brave guy CEO is a piece of shit though. Full on covid conspiracy lab made Fauci pandemic 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

      Brendan Eich is a co-founder of Mozilla. So if you’re not going to use Brave because of him. How can you use Firefox?

      • 8bitguy@kbin.social
        8·
        2 years ago

        Eich resigned Mozilla and started Brave over pressure from Mozilla because of his opposition to same sex marriage, and financial support to anti-same sex marriage intiatives.

          • digdug@kbin.social
            4·
            2 years ago

            Okay, maybe a not-for-profit organization that he voluntarily resigned from gave him a golden parachute deal with perpetual royalties that’s totally secret. We can never know …

            One thing we do know? Using Brave has a 100% chance of supporting him financially.

      • sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        I’m not, not directly. I’m using the mullvad browser. However, even if I was using firefox that is part of a not-for-profit organization that he is no-longer part of where the money and success do not benefit him. This is different than using a browser whose success gives him money, which he then uses to support causes I am vehemently against.

        If using brave did not support him I would accept an argument around my usage of it. It does however.

        Apologies for the fact that you’re getting downvoted, that is a reasonable question to ask

  • Eg3@lemmy.world
    10·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Karmmah@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 years ago

      It was an great moment when I learned that bangs exist. I only use two or three but it’s still amazing.

  • Deebster@beehaw.orgEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    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).

  • starneld@infosec.pub
    6·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • aaathats3as@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    51·
    2 years ago

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