90% of my searches don’t touch Google anymore. Here’s what I use instead

Google Search is the dominant search engine for a reason. It has comprehensive indexing of sites around the world, its search operators make finding specific results easier, and it’s the default for many browsers and devices. However, if you’ve been on the internet as long as I have, you’ll remember a time when Google Search just felt better overall.

I stuck with the search engine until last year. Now, I barely use it at all. And that’s thanks to how well its replacement — Brave Search — works for me.

The Google Search experience has been deteriorating for years. Genuinely relevant results are supplanted by sponsored results, the shopping tab is filled with irrelevant products, and you often have to scroll past a bunch of bloat before you find what you’re actually looking for.

For years, I gritted my teeth and begrudgingly dealt with the watered-down experience, believing that alternatives simply did not have the comprehensive indexing of a behemoth like Google. After all, if Microsoft’s Bing was still struggling years down the line, what hope did other alternatives have? I also wasn’t interested in a paid Google Search alternative.

AI Overviews proved to be the final straw. They added more bloat to the search experience, were often inaccurate, and I couldn’t turn them off. These overviews differed from helpful snippets because they could be the product of AI hallucinations. Snippets were direct quotes from sites, but overviews were generated by an LLM.

As a result, I found numerous instances where the overview included completely made-up information. When I clicked on the referenced site or video, it was about a completely different topic. This happened a few times when I was searching for information on how to change certain settings on MagicOS. The fact that Google continued to go all-in on AI features left me with no hope that the search engine would course-correct.

I didn’t make a conscious decision to seek out Google Search alternatives. In fact, for years I considered switching search engines impossible. But with my growing dissatisfaction, I started to play with the idea when I switched browsers.

Chrome was the first Google product I ditched as part of an active attempt to de-Google my life as much as possible. I tried a few different browsers on mobile, but eventually settled on Brave. This led me to adopt the browser on my PC too.

During this transition, I still used Google Search, but the frustration with AI overviews and AI features continued to grow. Brave Search was right there in my browser, and it was the default for private searches. And that’s when I started noticing that it provided a great experience despite not being developed by a company as large as Google.

The first thing that drew me to Brave was the lack of ads and sponsored results. The search engine is also powered by an independent index, so I hoped that it would avoid the SEO spam that plagues Google’s results. I also liked that I could switch off AI summaries, something that Google does not allow you to do. But out of curiosity, I tested the feature and found that it provided more accurate results than Google.

Eventually, when installing the app on a new phone, I left the AI summaries feature on. Don’t get me wrong, it does occasionally hallucinate, just like every generative AI tool. But its results were far more accurate and helpful. I still keep up the habit of checking the citations or just visiting sites directly, but it’s a useful way to uncover sources and fact-check yourself quickly.

Without the bloat of sponsored links, I was able to uncover relevant results more easily. When I was searching for a product from a specific site, it gave me the direct link without flooding me with sponsored alternatives.

Even though I previously used Google Search to help me uncover news, that function became unusable as well because of the way the company promotes its products. For example, if I search for an ongoing corruption commission in South Africa, Google surfaces a YouTube Music link over actual news stories. However, all of Brave’s results actually relate to the investigation and commission, even when referencing YouTube videos.

In Brave Search, I can still access useful widgets like currency conversions, weather, time zones, and maps. There aren’t as many tools as Google, but the ones I use the most are there. Most importantly, I’m not constantly bombarded by advertising. It’s the search experience that I once treasured — including useful newer improvements like widgets, without bloat like sponsored results.

As much as I love Brave Search, it isn’t perfect. There is one area where I notice the search engine occasionally struggles — local listings. If I search for a local business or location with the search engine, it sometimes cannot find the relevant information. This is when I have to use Google again to surface the right result.

I also occasionally use Google Search when doing online shopping. As much as its results are flooded with irrelevant results and products I can’t even buy in South Africa, it can still work as a jumping-off point for finding certain products. I only use Google when I want to see which large retailers might stock a category of item. For example, I recently did a search to see which retailers stock CGM devices.

Once I get an idea of which sites stock these items, I leave Google behind. This is because its actual shopping tab and widget don’t surface the most relevant results, but rather focus on the ones that were paid for. For example, when I search for “pet microchip feeder,” the majority of the results are other types of feeders that don’t use microchip scanning at all. This doesn’t help me, since I’m specifically looking for feeders that detect my cats’ microchips so they don’t eat each other’s food. One cat is on a renal diet for kidney disease, so an automatic feeder doesn’t help in this case.

Brave Search is able to bring up links to item listings, but it struggles to find results that are actually available in my market. If you’re a US user, you’re much less likely to encounter this limitation since it tends to surface results from Walmart, Amazon, and other US retailers. Even if I set my region to South Africa and make sure local results are enabled, Brave still surfaces those US results.

Despite Brave’s regional quirks, every time I use Google, I’m reminded why I stopped using it in the first place. Even for the few things I still use it for, like shopping, I feel like the experience continues to deteriorate. Brave Search, on the other hand, continues to improve.