Which privacy-focused search engine are you using?

https://lemmy.world/post/2688737

Which privacy-focused search engine are you using? - Lemmy.world

TL;DR - which privacy-focused search engine do people recommend, preferably one that can also easily be used as a default option in Safari? I ditched Google in about 2016ish I would guess, and since then have used DDG as my default search engine. As someone entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, it’s always seemed like a sound choice, as it’s one of the search engines built in to Safari on both iOS and macOS. After spending a bit more time recently playing around with and updating my Docker containers, I started hosting a Whoogle container, which seemed to work pretty well, but I don’t see many out there talking about it, so not sure how good it actually is. I then tried a SearXNG container, but either had it misconfigured or just wasn’t getting many search results back. At the moment I’m trying out Startpage, but I know there are potential privacy concerns since they were part-bought in 2019 by a US ad-tech company. I’m also playing around with different browsers at the moment, flicking between Safari, Firefox and Brave. At which point I stumbled across Brave Search, which seems pretty promising. So, which search engines do you all recommend?

I started paying for Kagi a few months ago and I'm loving it. Search results and tools are great. People balk at paying for a search engine, but at least this way I know I'm not the product.
Kagi has been great. I’d like to see more searches on their $5 plan as 300 searches a month doesn’t feel adequate. It has been great being able to promote, demote, and block sites from searching and I have found my results to be more helpful and relevant than Google alternatives I tried. I don’t think I have used Google search at all since signing up. Highly recommend.
I’ve been loving my kagi trial. I used my 100 searches. I’ll wait to see how long I can suffer before I buy it.