I really just want some quality, free, privacy respecting search backends for searxng. I guess I can only pick 2 out of 3 :/

Why is brave even an option. Avoid that at all costs.

Daily reminder that the majority of alternative search engines get their upstream results from Bing or Google. As part of their agreements with Microsoft and Google, they may share some information with them. This is not a secret or anything; you can read it all in their terms of service.

Also a reminder that most of these search engines are black boxes. They're all closed source and all we have is their "just trust us" promises of privacy and security and none of them have been audited by trusted third parties as far as I am aware. At this point, just use the one that most closely aligns with your personal values and ethics.

DDG has a no ai version which is what I use.

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

If you do any self-hosting, hosting your own instance of SearXNG is a much better way to go. No AI and you actually get results for what you search for. It pulls results from all the other search engines and you can choose which engines you want in settings, and it masks your IP so the other search engines don't see where the requests actually come from. But even if you don't self-host, SearXNG is just a much better privacy respecting search engine anyway.

I use qwant, mainly because its european. The quality is not that good imo, but its ok for my usage

SearXNG is a little tricky to set up, but worthwhile. If you're lazy, I trust DDG over Brave any day of the week.

I’ve been using DDG as my default for probably longer than I ever used Google, so I’ll share my thoughts on it

What I like:

• Nice UI with plenty of options
• Optional AI features
• Great image search with tons of filters and an AI slop blocker that works reasonably well

What I don’t like:

• Localized results are not good (Startpage might be better for those)
• No LLM search API, so I use Brave API for that

They’ve had controversies in the past, but I’ve not heard of any in recent years tbh

I stopped using DDG because it kept steering me to articles that were rehosted with paywalls by MSN instead of the actual source of the content.

I use Brave mostly, because they at least pretend to be private, and I actually get some decent results.

Unsurprisingly the best results come from Kagi, the paid service, primarily because they let you cater the results to your preferences. You can blacklist certain sites, prefer others, and even search the "small web" for blogs and such from smaller creators, and the Fediverse at large.

Kagi in general, and if I feel extra strongly about privacy, I use Privacy Pass mode which is cryptographically guaranteed private.

I use mainly Startpage and Mojeek, sometimes Ecosia and Qwant. Not so for privacy, but by far the best for image search is Yandex (yes, I know). But anyway there is always needed to use several search engines + specific page searches for an deeper research. Respect privacy there are only few conditions, the search engine don't log your searches (avoiding filter bubble), don't use AI of big corps, no SEO crap and don't use tracking cookies, given in most engines except Google, Bing and Yahoo. Privacy isn't a main problem in other engines as these and finish when you visit the searched page, where the protection from any search engine finish if you do it without proxy or VPN.