Used Google and Chrome for the past several years, but in the past several months, ads on Priuschat became so invasive, taking a hint from Mendal switched to FireFox with Ublock and DuckDuckGo. Am finding DuckDuckGo is somewhat okay, but a bit wanting. Okay, a lot wanting. Well, that's me. I am sure the Duck is great for many folk, but I do have obtuse search ideas, such as folks climbing Mt. Foraker in 1993. But Firefox with the adblock is fantastic. Would like to stay away from Google. Any search engines that "wow" you without raping you in the process?
Yeah... Google Search became unusable to me well by end of last year. DuckDuckGo and Firefox was part of my De-Google strategy last Fall. So far it works fairly well for everything except street addresses for directions and to confirm location. It's terrible at making it easy to find stuff on a map. Also its AI is good for brief simple answers but am often failing its reply and heading to Claude to get more accurate info to questions with more complexity.
Policy at work makes adding software more convoluted, so I stuck with Edge with my PC upgrade. Whatever ad-block plug-in I added works. Also set it to wipe cookies and history when exiting. Home is Firefox and Ghostery with duckduckgo. Brave is one I haven't gotten around to trying. I keep meaning to add -ai to search queries.
You mentioned search in the title but seem to be refering to browsers. I stick with the Safari browser and selected DuckDuckGo for the search engine. I tried the DuckDuckGo browser a while back but came back to Safari.
Just a note; Edge fires a bunch of background processes and the last time I checked - several years ago; it stored everything in a "back-up" directory - even when set to erase on exit. Ditto; with outlook. That's part of the security and administration process of MS-OS. I believe it's even more tightly knit together with "resume - on another device". That information is saved on a central server somewhere, so you can login from a totally different device and resume your work. Nothing is as private as you think it is. You give up security and privacy for convenience and access across a VPN - if it's setup properly. I started my career as a programmer; now called app specialist, designer??? Don't know and haven't kept up, because the pay was lousy, the hours was long, and there was always that guy in India that would work for rice or peanuts. No offense; cost of living in India is much cheaper than in the states...... YMMV
Most interested in: Search Engine. Google level results. Not Google level tracking, etc. The duck is just not doing it. Did a search on an Alaska climb and got four returns from duckduckgo. Google had pages. Sure, some of Google's results were out there, but many were what I was looking for.
Forgot to mention I use Bing at work. Works well enough. Might double check something on Google, but that's rare.Bing mostly annoys me be the larger AI response splash. Just switched DuckDuckGo to Brave at home. Will report back, but I mostly just going to the same old same old, so this may not be soon. I assume we are talking full fledge computer here, and not something Android based. I use Firefox Focus for browser/engine on my phone.
