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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.