I also left DDG, but have been very satisfied with Brave's search. [1] They also have a nice optional LLM system built in that provides citations to what it says, which is pretty neat. They also have 'goggles' which enable you to apply or create a chosen filter to reorder/refilter results. So e.g. getting news while blocking partisan sites (or indulging our own partisan preferences), searching only tech blogs, blocking big tech sites, searching for video/audio from non-YouTube sources or whatever else. Lots of neat stuff that I'm surprised other sites haven't cloned yet.

[1] - https://search.brave.com/

I never had good luck with DDG, and found myself using !g to jump over go Google a lot.

I switch to Kagi about a year ago and had a much better experience. My browser defaulted itself back to Google one day, and I didn’t notice the heading but when I looked at the results I recoiled in disgust at how bad it was. I looked at the top of the page and saw it was Google. That was the last time I used Google and it wasn’t even on purpose.

Several times now at work, I’ve joined a call where people had been troubleshooting for hours trying to find an answer to some issues, presumably using Google a lot in the process. I end up using Kagi, finding an answer, and the call wraps up 15 minutes later. This has happened at least 3 times now, and I’m not on these types of calls often.

It’s so nice to be the customer and not the product.