  New methods have been recently developed to search for strong gravitational
lenses, in particular lensed quasars, in wide-field imaging surveys. Here, we
compare the performance of three different, morphology- and photometry- based
methods to find lens candidates over the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) DR3
footprint (440 deg$^2$). The three methods are: i) a multiplet detection in
KiDS-DR3 and/or Gaia-DR1, ii) direct modeling of KiDS cutouts and iii)
positional offsets between different surveys (KiDS-vs-Gaia, Gaia-vs-2MASS),
with purpose-built astrometric recalibrations. The first benchmark for the
methods has been set by the recovery of known lenses. We are able to recover
seven out of ten known lenses and pairs of quasars observed in the KiDS DR3
footprint, or eight out of ten with improved selection criteria and looser
colour pre-selection. This success rate reflects the combination of all methods
together, which, taken individually, performed significantly worse (four lenses
each). One movelty of our analysis is that the comparison of the performances
of the different methods has revealed the pros and cons of the approaches and,
most of all, the complementarities. We finally provide a list of high-grade
candidates found by one or more methods, awaiting spectroscopic follow-up for
confirmation. Of these, KiDS 1042+0023 is to our knowledge the first confirmed
lensed quasar from KiDS, exhibiting two quasar spectra at the same source
redshift at either sides of a red galaxy, with uniform flux-ratio
$f\approx1.25$ over the wavelength range
$0.45\mu\mathrm{m}<\lambda<0.75\mu\mathrm{m}.$
