Best alternative search engine option that actually works?

It depends on my usecase, though I generally stick with a rotation between Brave search, Startpage, and Duckduckgo[1] for general search, and I’m a big believer in adding site specific “site search” to my browser for more niche use cases.[2]

I’ve experimented with SearXNG in the past, but I’ve had a hard time finding a public instance that is both stable and trustworthy, and I don’t really want to self host it.

Mojeek, and Metager were okay but did not have some locally relevant relevant results which I would regularly rely on.

I still have to give PriEco a try one of these days

And yeah, the search space is better than the browser space, but it still isn’t great (in my opinion)

1. I am aware of Duckduckgo’s lack of independence here, but I do still get some use out of it. ↩︎

2. Think adding stack exchange for programming questions and PG forum for privacy questions. ↩︎