I did try though. It's not that.
DuckDuckGo was my default for a while. I really liked its privacy features and results were also fine, mostly.
But "mostly fine" starts to wear on you when you're searching for something specific and the search relevance starts to mess up a bit.
And the way the UI looks and feels it kinda gives me this feeling like it wasn't really made for someone like me.
Perplexity was good for research. Actually really good. Summarizes sources, shows citations, saves a lot of tab-switching. I still use it for that.
But as a daily default? Maybe not for me.
Brave Search has its own index, 30 billion pages, nothing borrowed from Google or Bing. I liked that in theory.
In practical use, local search was kind of rough.
Ecosia was the one I felt good about. Every search plants trees, they've hit 200 million planted.
But the results come from Bing and you feel it.
So I came back to Google.
And the annoying thing is, it's just better. Faster. More accurate for local stuff. Better maps. Better shopping results.
The AI overviews are annoying but you learn to scroll past them.
I get why people leave. The tracking is real. The ads are getting worse. The search results feel more SEO-gamed than they used to.
But for day to day use, I felt that nothing else is close yet.
Maybe that changes. Perplexity is growing fast, around 35-45 million searches a day now, up from almost nothing in 2022.
Brave is building. DuckDuckGo has a loyal crowd.
But I wish I had DuckDuckGo in Google's UI.
I'll probably try again in a year.
This piece has the full numbers if you care about that stuff.