Nowadays it's always needed to use several search engines to fullfit a deeper research. If own or third party search index is irrelevant, every search engine handle it in a different manner. More important as this that the search engine don't logs your activity, this is given in most search engines, except Google, Bing, (Brave) and Yahoo. Startpage, Mojeek, Ecosia, Qwant, MetaGer, Swisscows (if you have childrens and need a Family safe search) among others, are very valid. Also usefull searches of specific pages (WolphramAlpha, Wiki, Forums, etc) and to add also analytic pages as search engine (Blacklight, VirusTotal, Webbkoll, etc), to check unknown URLs.

Why does no one mention Qwant, Mojeek, or Ecosia? Those are pretty good

You may want to reconsider your stance on subscriptions if you're looking to degoogle and go towards more privacy. General stance in the community (if I remember right) is that if you're not paying for the product, YOU are the product. Meaning they will likely be sharing more information, even if inadvertently through ad networks and whatnot.

If you have the ability to selfhost then searxng is also a very good option.

de-googling is a process, it won't be perfect for a long time. No matter what many comments say, just starting with one or two things is already huge.

Both DDG and Brave Search are already an improvement. Go with the choice that causes the least resistance and then keep improving from there, as long as it works for you.

Striving for ideological perfection is a dead-end.

Brave is some Crypto-Bro stuff, i'd go with DDG or Kagi. At some point you could get a Junk-PC and run SearXNG on it

Brave is a crypto bro sham that blocks external ads just to insert their own

For me it’s mostly cause of this asshole.

If this is how they actively go against their own browser ethos, what makes you think they will stick to their search engine ethos.?

https://lemmy.world/comment/21269260

I always recommend https://noai.duckduckgo.com/%s because I'm trying to find results without AI/LLM. Nearly all search engines, including Brave, have AI results as a default. Sure, I can disable the AI results in the engine's settings but it's reset the next time I open my browser.

Does mojeek have its own index? I see in preferences you can choose where you get results from and brave is one option selected by default.

Options like qwant, ddg, swisscow, etc are also available. Are those any good? Do they use their own indexes? I know ddg doesn’t.

Waterfox is the AI-free way to go.

I'll share my unpopular stance. You can use Brave search from any browser, I use it with Librewolf. This way I get independent web index without any crypto-bro shit. So what is advantage over using DDG? Its that they actually have their own index so its not just a front for some megacorp.

When I was looking around for web search Kagi and Mojeek weren't as good. Maybe that is changed now. What I do know is that Google that I have on my work machine doesn't perform any better than Brave.

I do not want to be vilified for saying this, so I will echo what everyone else seems to be suggesting of DDG being a good degoogled search engine.

When I started to degoogle, personally do not remember what I was using DDG and ecosia probably. I hear ecosia has jumped into the AI game which I think is icky for what they are trying to do.

I later started getting into home labbing. I am in no way suggesting that you should jump into that right now, this is a rather expensive lifestyle, it starts with one project and you think oh fun what can I replace next? So the search engine I use now is searXNG, which I have set to pull from Bing, wikiepedia, and a bunch of smaller engines. I am just trying to say there are options for you to look into in the future. Not right now you are just getting out of the Google ecosystem