The ULTIMATE Search Engine Tier List (Based Tier to Surveillance Tier)

Looking for the best search engine, but don't want to send all of your private data to an evil corporation? In this video, I'm going to rank all the search engines and reveal once and for all which are the best of the best and which are the worst of the worst. I'll be ranking them based on their search results, user privacy, and their bias and censorship. Is DuckDuckGo really as good as they say? Find out in this video!

0:00 Intro
2:15 Bing
4:16 Brave Search
8:02 DuckDuckGo
12:14 Ecosia
14:17 Google
15:08 Metager
17:38 Mojeek
19:43 Searx
24:09 Startpage
27:00 Swisscows
28:30 Qwant
30:05 Whoogle
30:57 Yandex
32:44 My recommendations

[MirrorMansionQ]

these tier lists are awesome, i hope we see more for things like email and vpn services.

[DccToon]

"it gets it from yahoo, which is bing, and bing, which is also bing, you can see all of them are bing"
P1 - Wait everything is bing?
P2 - always has been

[AKABeestYT]

The main reason I personally have Yandex bookmarked is because of its suprisingly accurate results. Not only is the reverse image search well beyond google images, the simple search terms give me exactly what I need on the first page. Mostly looking for leaks and torrents that other search engines hide.

[MaxPanic]

Duckduckgo should be in the surveillance tier. They host on AWS and AWS are a US government contractor. Everything that flows through AWS is likely handed over to the NSA.

[djongaGod]

One thing I'd like to add: this tier list is based only from searches in english. If you search in another language, most of the tools in the "based or excellent" tier would not be so good.

[CorneliusCornbread]

4:16 I REALLY wish you mentioned Brave search's best feature: Discussions. Brave search will actually show you related forum posts related to your questions on Reddit and other forums too ocasionally. Reddit for many people, me included, is where I go when I say "I want software that everyone else uses" or "I want advice and I want it to be rated based on general public opinion." It's insanely helpful and can often times be a significantly better source of information than articles (which I'm realizing is a really sad reality now that I'm writing it out).

[Damariobros]

Is there a good search engine that hasn't killed off search operators like inclusion, exclusion, and/or/xor, website filters, date, exact phrase, etc? I used to be a power user on Google and could usually find pretty much whatever I was looking for, and I was absolutely pissed when not just Google, not just Bing, not just YouTube, but pretty much every website across the entire internet seemed to all collectively kill off their search operators as part of going "minimalist." I'm still pissed because I can't ever seem to find anything I'm looking for nowadays.

[Alorand]

I definitely use Yandex for reverse image searches. I guess I wouldn't mind an anonymous frontend so that I could get the controversial politicized stuff from them too. What I am really hoping to find is a better search for YouTube videos that have just been posted. I remember when the Notre Dame Cathedral was burning and YouTube would only show you videos from official mainstream news channels instead of Paris residents who uploaded their unique perspective.

[paulcrandall]

So glad I found this video. I've been using DDG full time for the past 4 years. The search results are just getting worse over time. I also search for a lot of technical information and I'm constantly finding myself needing to search Google instead. It's frustrating. It's also frustrating when these search engines are openly biased admit to down-ranking results or pushing a specific narrative or agenda. Let me be the one to research various topics and come to my own conclusions instead of trying to tell me what to think.

[ericstoverink]

I remember the OG search engines, when the Internet first started becoming a household thing. This was all before google. You had Yahoo, (before it became the cesspit of the internet), Lycos, Webcrawler, Ask Jeeves, Hotbot, and Alta Vista. Ah, the good 'ol days.

[ripleyhrgiger]

I know this is an older video of yours so maybe you won't see the comment. But, I wanted to say that I really love your videos. These aren't just tier list they're actually informational, instructional, and very well presented. You have a very good speaking voice, you're clear, concise, fun, and you don't take yourself too seriously and aren't afraid to poke a little fun at yourself and those of us who do sometimes go nuts with privacy. The best part though is that you're not pushing any agenda towards cryptocurrency (like some other "privacy" focused channels) and you seem to genuinely want to educate us on how we can take steps to make our online experiences more private and enjoyable.

Thank you for putting these videos together and taking the time to bring us something that is entertaining and educational.

[pauljs]

Mojeek seems like it could be a good obscure topic search if it's bringing less common results to the front. The other searches would bury that stuff behind link farms or more popular stuff with similar sounding names.

So the criteria putting it lower on the list in the video may be different for some people. (It could have gotten an asterisk in that regard if it's consistent in what it did here.)

[bradh.johnson]

I dropped DDG when they started imposing their (Bing's) definition of mis/dis-information. Bill Gate's definition and my definition vary greatly.

[linkhidalgogato]

i think its also worth pointing out about duckduckgo that they censor results based on their politics when the invasion of ukraine started they proudly announced they would start censoring russian sources and just russians in general, which regardless of what u think of the conflict this is bad just as a matter of principle.

[sugarpolecat]

Google really holds a tight grip on this, cause I didn't even know there are THAT many search engines.

[gokublack]

Microsoft and Google: You call it personal data I call it...free real estate

[SauceyRedHN]

On the point of DuckDuckGo search results sometimes being useless, I personally solve that issue with just adding the site filter thing set to Reddit at the end, because a lot of my searches are things that probably has answers on some subreddit. Although, I don't ever really have an issue with bad search results, or at least not bad enough that I want to switch.
As for the controversies, they haven't done anything that bothers me enough to switch.

[buddahegypt]

Yandex is the king of reverse image search for sure. Its essential for romance scammer exposure

[gamingtonight]

I have been using Ecosia for years - happy with the results, and helped plant 40 trees!

[thejoman]

as a minor, google has a different privacy policy for me and other people under 18, if you have a google account and are under 18, as far as i know, as of 2023 google is no longer allowed to target ads to child accounts, so i only get generic ads, which is annoying but nice to know that they collect less data than normal.