What are the best alternatives to Google Search?

Best overall alternative: DuckDuckGo if you want a familiar search experience with stronger privacy by default.

Other good choices depend on what you want:

• Startpage — good if you like Google-style results but want more privacy.
• Bing — strong general-purpose alternative, especially if you use Microsoft services.
• Brave Search — privacy-focused and more independent than many meta-search engines.
• Kagi — paid search with fewer distractions and strong customization.
• Perplexity — better for AI-style summarized answers than traditional link searching.
• Ecosia — good if you want a simple search engine tied to environmental initiatives.
• Mojeek — independent search index, useful if you want something less reliant on Google/Bing.

My quick recommendation: use DuckDuckGo as your default, keep Bing or Startpage as a backup, and use Perplexity when you want a summarized answer instead of browsing many links.