Ask HN: In 2025, what search engine offers the best results?

Usually I use duckduckgo, but mostly out of habit. It has the same results as bing, and I’m dubious as to whether or not it’s actually private because I get location specific results from them which come from bing. Bing/duckduckgo isn’t nearly as broad as google, and it also is dumb in the same way as google because it has a bunch of AI spam.

For quality of ranking, and human results, I have had good experiences with marginalia (https://marginalia-search.com/). It only has about 1 billion pages in it’s index, so it won’t be nearly as good for obscure things, but for quality of results I am fond of it. I don’t use it very often though and maybe I should.

This is a great list of search engines with independent indexes: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

I think it would be great if someone made a meta-search engine with as many engines from that list as possible, and focussed on really good ranking. A tool like that could be best for obscurity and result quality. Unfortunately the meta-search engines that I know of don’t use many sources, and they don’t get all the available results before re-ranking them.

Oh also, there are a surprising number of engines that shut down under suspicious circumstances. This is a good article about those ones: https://archive.org/details/search-timeline