There are more downsides than the obvious downside of privacy to using Google these days. Top results are usually advertisements or results from sites like Reddit and such that provide their own search engine that if you wanted to search their articles and posts you wouldn’t need a general search engine. There’s also massive censorship and search results based on the geolocation on your device varies drastically in a creepy manner. So I’m going to recommend several replacements to google and my own approach.
Brave
You may have heard about the Brave Browser which is an excellent chromium based browser. They also released their search engine not so long ago. The search results are not biased and are more accurate than other options like DuckDuckgo. They have also removed their depedency on Bing search completely which is very good news.
SearXNG
The best approach, is the decentralized approach. Searx is a meta search engine that you can host yourself and gives you results from different search engines anonymously and without geolocation bias or advertisement. There are also a lot of public instances that you can use all listed at https:/searx.space.
Swiss Cows
This is also a decent search engine that I used for a while. It’s main feature on the other ones is that it filters out all the inappropriate adult content so it’s a good choice to use on your children’s devices or your own’s for that matter.
DuckDuckGo
This is the most popular “Privacy Centric” search engine in a sense. But it acts kind of intrusive with all the pop-ups to force you to install it’s browser and plugin and … And as I mentioned the results can be off sometimes. Recently they also did some censorship on torrent websites and russian news sites which is a fishy act. But it still is a better choice than google search.
