Personally I am not a fan of brave. Between running their own crypto currency, inserting affiliate links to pages and an advert revenue share. It seems like they are trying to be a middleman to your web experience.

I have been a Firefox user since 2004ish and mainly runAdnausem and consent-o-matic to keep my web experience as clean as possible.

It is always funny to look into my Adnausem ad vault to see what people are trying to advertise to me.

Using privacy and Brave in the same sentence is a quite a leap.

Brave is an ad company. Don't use Brave.

First, to answer the main question of the post, I've been using DuckDuckGo on and off, switching between it and Mojeek ultimately wanting to use Mojeek as my primary search engine once it improves a bit.

Before using any Brave product I highly recommend people read up on the CEO, especially the "Appointment to CEO and resignation" section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich TL;DR:

Aside from that, I don't trust anything Brave due to their affiliate link controversy they had, I do not trust they won't "accidentally" do something similar with their search engine. No software or CEO is without their fair share of controversy, but I feel it's best to at least know what they are.

As for DuckDuckGo, their CEO Gabriel Weinburg's primary buried controversy is the Names Database

I will use Firefox until the day it completely stops existing. You can pry it from my cold, dead hands. In regards to search engines, I'm using Startpage these days. I am actively looking around for something else that is free as in beer, useful, and reliable. I want to set and forget it, not constantly manage it because the instance I use is down or something.

Tried Brave Search and felt like it was the closest to Google Search, in terms of a modernized-feel and good UI/UX, but after reading about the company and their questionable ethics, I switched to DDG instead. I'll sacrifice my experience to avoid the more suspect company

@Sterben tho this post might not be doing so but still dont get why people like to compare and pick only 1 search engine to use forever

Just use all of them. Try all. Everyone has unique needs

Each company has differences in indexing. Tho the duck is Bing based, it chose to block "russian propaganda". For something as vast as the net, using 1 engine is like using only 1 eye to see the world

For a truly open perspective, use multiple! Only for convenience's of daily searches, maybe pick one

I'm using metager.org, because I won't trust a closed-source service like DDG or profit-driven company like Brave to not censor their search results.

"Yes, a security researcher revealed this week that even DuckDuckGo, which markets itself as "the internet privacy company," made an exception for its business partner Microsoft to its browser's blocking of some advertising trackers on websites, sparking accusations of betraying its purported privacy ethos."

No offense but I am not sure why people trust duckduckgo or brave. Brave for the obvious concerns with controversy surrounding their CEO. And duckduckgo for essentially being diet bing.

I'd recommend a searxng instance.

Brave is not a bad browser, but it uses Chromium under the hood. That is bad, because it supports Google's monopoly on browser rendering engines. You can either stick to Firefox, or check out LibreWolf. It's Firefox but with uBlock Origin preinstalled and all the privacy features already enabled and configured.

I must give props to Brave Search for its AI summarizer, which suprisingly does a pretty good job at using high quality sources from its index to give you a brief synopsis of the query.

I use all of them, at once, with searx.

DDG uses bing and they filter results based on their biased opinion. Just give me results let me care about the rest! Brave has a limited index, plus not a huge fan of their crypto scam. StartPage gets results from Google and seems better than the above two. But Google itself filters results so not great. tbh, to get unfiltered great results try Yandex, they do have good index and seem no or less filtering. It would be great if SearX would provide a wrapper around Yandex, but AFAIK Yandex blocks bots and non-human interactions and it is hard to add SearX support. Kagi - I don't want an extra subscription.

For now, I think SearX/Whooper instances are good enough

I use Brave Search and Firefox. But sometimes i have to use Chromium for compatibility issues although it is so rare.

I primarily user Startpage and DuckDuckGo. With all the controversies surrounding it and its founder, I can't bring myself to trusting Brave.

I'd never get into the Brave ecosystem. Have been trialing Kagi, it's been doing on par with Google thus far but I haven't trialed it hard.

Used Brave for a bit during August and liked it (mainly their Discussions feature) but stopped using it since I always liked Startpage. I see a few mentions of Mojeek here, so I'll give it a shot

Edit: Spelling correction (shot from shit kekw)

Edit II: Mojeek's results are bad

Why did you switch?

I gave brave search 2 goes over some years apart. everytime I get a captcha I said f u brave. duckduck not a single captcha.

I trust more the DDG search ingini, brave kinda sucks ass.

Same here, I mostly use brave search with occasional !ecos. Although, both companies have made questionable stuff in their browsers (ddg -- not blocking m$ trackers, brave -- similar stuff with trackers, don't remember which, plus the whole affiliate link debacle).