Kagi in my experience is the best, but $$

Brave is a close second, but crypto bro

SearXNG is great, but only if you self host to avoid throttling

Most of the rest use Bing under the hood so they're all about the same

Just ask me. I will tell you.

Qwant

SearxNG is the only way I know of to get reasonably good results.

These aren't what I would call 'best,' just supplemental when the best isn't cutting it.

Marginalia is pretty decent. I like that it lets you specifically search forums, wikis, blogs, or academia.

https://wiby.me/ is good for exploring old-school sites. This is more of an answer to "how do I 'surf the web' in 2026?" than what you're probably asking for. (The search itself is very keyword-y with no attempt to guess at relevance.)

I'd join the others here recommending Kagi if you can stomach the price. I've tried quite a few over the years but have now been on Kagi for over 2 years and can't really see myself going back. Nothing I've tried comes close. And this is coming from someone that hates subscriptions and self host pretty much everything.

Kagi if you're rich, a combo of DDG and https://searxng.website/ if you're poor.

Altavista circa 1999. Google stole the crown and was good for a long while after that, but it's intentionally worse now than Altavista was back then.

If someone like DuckDuckGo could get their heads out of their cloacas long enough to fix the + and - features for "must contain" and "must not contain", they could easily steal that crown.

Used to use Brave, but I read some shady stuff and hate the crypto. I've switched to Startpage, as far as I know they're doing good and gets the job done for me.

Have a look at https://osint.be/curated-list/

ecosia seemed to work slightly better than ddg for me recently, but there's some controversies regarding their greenwashing and union busting

qwant seems to be pretty good but they geoblock specific countries including mine. it works through a vpn tho

startpage is just google

etools.ch is quite nice, even works without javascript but somehow they're not so popular..

yandex is decent quality wise, but i get endless captchas from them for some reason

I find myself going back and fourth between Qwant and DDG

I host SearXNG on my home server, and I configured it to provide better results than Google.

I tried Kagi. It's nice, but the price is a bit high for a search engine.

On ddg I just type reddit when I want community stuff, but I know what you mean. I also still find myself using google for local stuff because yelp fucking sucks.

Startpage is alright

Kagi. People pay for it for a reason.