If you haven't encountered Kagi search, you may want to check it out:
https://kagi.com/
I had it recommended to me by a guy that is so paranoid that he runs his own personal search engine himself - so he doesn't use Kagi, but he's heard good things from "people I trust" as he told me.
It isn't free. In fact, its relatively expensive. Being paid, you are the customer, not the product. No ads, no tracking, no "personalized results" from tracking or data harvesting. I'm currently evaluating it with a 100 search free "try it out" signup. As much as I hate subscriptions, I may very well go to the $5/mo for 300 searches next, and eventually migrate to the $10/mo unlimited or even the $15/mo "Kagi for couples" so my wife can use it too. I'll see - like I said, I'm evaluating it...
Thus far, the search results I've gotten are at least as good as Google's, and are a LOT better/easier to deal with as nobody's trying to sell you something. Better organized too, with minimal repeats and its not afraid to tell you when its out of results instead of feeding increasingly garbage results to you.
However, two features stand out:
1) They have a "verbatim" button. It acts like Google is supposed to act - but doesn't - when you surround each individual word with quotes. This forces the search to return what's called a Boolean AND search. Only results with ALL your words in them will get returned - which is as it fucking should be. Its very powerful, but its also very specific, it (apparently thus far) won't return hits on word variations, it won't apply heuristics to your search and try to guess what you may or may not really want/need. Its not suitable for all searches, but its a blessing when you need it. I do a lot of VERY specific searches and its a gift from the Goddess as far as I'm concerned - thus far at least.
2) In addition to being able to block things with a minus sign, you can also permanently block garbage domains - I promptly populated that with facesuck, instatwat, TWITter/X, etc.
There are other unique features that I have yet to try, but its looking good so far...
https://kagi.com/
I had it recommended to me by a guy that is so paranoid that he runs his own personal search engine himself - so he doesn't use Kagi, but he's heard good things from "people I trust" as he told me.
It isn't free. In fact, its relatively expensive. Being paid, you are the customer, not the product. No ads, no tracking, no "personalized results" from tracking or data harvesting. I'm currently evaluating it with a 100 search free "try it out" signup. As much as I hate subscriptions, I may very well go to the $5/mo for 300 searches next, and eventually migrate to the $10/mo unlimited or even the $15/mo "Kagi for couples" so my wife can use it too. I'll see - like I said, I'm evaluating it...
Thus far, the search results I've gotten are at least as good as Google's, and are a LOT better/easier to deal with as nobody's trying to sell you something. Better organized too, with minimal repeats and its not afraid to tell you when its out of results instead of feeding increasingly garbage results to you.
However, two features stand out:
1) They have a "verbatim" button. It acts like Google is supposed to act - but doesn't - when you surround each individual word with quotes. This forces the search to return what's called a Boolean AND search. Only results with ALL your words in them will get returned - which is as it fucking should be. Its very powerful, but its also very specific, it (apparently thus far) won't return hits on word variations, it won't apply heuristics to your search and try to guess what you may or may not really want/need. Its not suitable for all searches, but its a blessing when you need it. I do a lot of VERY specific searches and its a gift from the Goddess as far as I'm concerned - thus far at least.
2) In addition to being able to block things with a minus sign, you can also permanently block garbage domains - I promptly populated that with facesuck, instatwat, TWITter/X, etc.
There are other unique features that I have yet to try, but its looking good so far...
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