stevegamer4235

DuckDuckGo: This is probably the most well-known google/bing alternative, and I admittedly don't have much to say about it. It's definitely the most easy to use choice, with it basically just being bing with a toggle for the AI slop and letting you replace the "www" in the URL with "noai" to remove any AI features by default. I'm still a bit hesitant to call it private since I've heard people suggest it might have some microsoft trackers now, but I failed to find anything definitive to prove this. If anyone else can figure out whether those claims are true or not, please let me know! Also, it's a bit odd that they use Apple Maps over something like OpenStreetMap.

StartPage: This is the one I'm personally using at the time of writing. This one uses OpenStreetMap for the map service, which I mentioned earlier, and it has pretty good results. It notably does not have an AI overview by default, and I'm not even sure if that's really a thing it does. The only AI stuff is hidden in the menu bar on the side which is closed by default, so you really have to go out of your way to use that. I highly recommend reading through the privacy policy for yourself if you wish to use this. The nice thing about this service is that the privacy policy is short and simple, so it's a very quick read that makes it clear how they handle your data. StartPage does have some notable flaws though. The news search barely has any results, and the image search isn't always the best, so it might be a good idea to try using a seperate search engine alongside this one for image/news searches.

Qwant: This is another good pick. I used this for a while until I got confident enough with startpage to use that as my primary engine. An interesting thing about this search engine is that they have a sponsorship with Murena, the creators of the privacy-focused Android fork known as /e/OS. This sponsorship spawned its own version of the Qwant engine which you can access by replacing the "www" in the normal url with "murena", and it's almost the exact same as the normal page with the exception of having no AI features. The only issue I ever faced with Qwant is that it lacks a proper map search, but you can always just use OpenStreetMap directly if you need to do a private map service.

SearXNG: This one is a bit different from all the prior ones. SearXNG is an open source search engine made for anyone to host. It can index a variety of search services (google, bing, etc.) while privatizing your data before sending it. Most importantly, the only ways to use it are to either find a good "instance" of it online using this list or by installing and configuring it onto your own system to run it locally. Since it is very customizable, that may mean that you will need to mess with the default settings for the services it indexes if you want the results to be more consistent with what you're used to unless the instance you choose already has good defaults. It also has a weird issue where it sometimes gets blocked by the search providers, so you may need to try refreshing a few times to get the search to work right at times. This is most likely the result of it anonymizing you before sending requests, which could make you appear similar to a bot to the services.