I use duck duck go. Google is tech bro trash
Duckduckgo has a problem where you used to be able to select no location and now that defaults to your real one.
I want non geolocation results.
doesn’t seem very popular but ive been using etools.ch lately and it’s decent. it also works without javascript
There’s other search engines that are less Ai heavy.
Or you could go with SearXNG
Duck Duck Go is my default, but increasingly I use the Wikipedia app, because usually I’m looking for detailed information, and it’s a cut-to-the-chase option.
I’ve been using kagi and even replaced the default search on my iPhone with it. Works great
Google seems hell-bent on AI; DuckDuckGo lets you easily disable AI search. Try it out.
They provide this handy url as well: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
Duckduckgo is just bing search
While I believe most of their results originate from Bing, according to their Wikipedia page they have used over 400 sources including Bing, Yahoo, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler. And even if 100% of their results were from Bing, saying it’s “just bing search” is very misleading.
I quit Google. No longer use them for search, email, drive, or docs. They infested everything with AI and they bend the knee to fascists. I’m done.
Oh they’re planning to replace the standard link view with AI overview in general :3 source
There’re quite a few alternative search engines; I personally use duckduckgo, but startpage is also good, I hear, I’ve been trying it out in cases where ddg doesn’t get my desired results :3. There’s also searXNG which is more technical, but quite good in terms of fetching results from a bunch of stuff, and a lot of people I know swear by kagi, but that one is a paid service. Those are the main “big” ones I see around. Of course they’re by far not the only ones
Going to pop in with a vote for Kagi. They are paid, but they also run their own index so they don’t use Google at all. Well worth it.
Bing is still worse. Today I searched Rufus on Bing.
The website of the project wasn’t even on the first page of the results.That’s odd, the entire first page of results is about the software when I just searched on Bing. The official site was the top result.
DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia are the two big ones that tend to come up in these kind of questions, although there’s a handful of smaller search platforms out there as well. Bing is even worse than Google at this point. If I recall correctly Ecosia uses a custom search algorithm but still relies mostly on Google’s index at this time, DuckDuckGo is entirely independent.
I’ve been using Kagi as well to good success. I just wish I could pay for just the search portion and fully disable the assistant, but at least it’s optional
duckduckgo uses bing doesn’t it? the results seem mostly identical to me
I’m pretty sure yes, if you use ddg news there’ll be a lot of results from MSN, owned by Microsoft
If I recall correctly it queries the Bing API among other niche sources for indexing and acts as a proxy for ad purposes, so while there’s a lot of Bing results, it’s not one-to-one. Unless they changed things recently, it’s possible I missed a press release.
Google has been getting worse since before AI, it’s because it’s advantage stemmed from indexing the public web, but as the web turned into a half a dozen walled gardens it lost that edge.
It’s losing customers to AI so it’s trying to clone their features, pretty, but it’s been trying this with just regurgitating Wikipedia for a while.
I don’t know for sure but I suspect internally the incompetent middle management layer are pushing AI usage as a metric and forcing engineers to ruin their best product because management don’t know the value of Google (because they are by and large morons who use AI).
The AI usage can be avoided with other search engines but the walled garden problem is here to stay, on a closed Internet search is always going to suck.
I don’t know for sure but I suspect internally the incompetent middle management layer are pushing AI usage as a metric
Yeah this is reportedly happening at all the big tech corporations.
My take is that the CEOs, SVPs, VPs, etc. are bullshitting each other that AI is multiplying productivity SO MUCH, because that’s what everyone else is saying too. But each of them isn’t actually seeing that happen in their company/org, so they figure that’s because their underlings simply aren’t using AI enough, and the only way to fix the productivity expectation gap is to enforce more AI usage
Kagi is far and away the best search option right now.
Yea but kinda seems like I have to pay for privilege.
Someone always pays for your search.
It’s only a question of who, and what do they want you to see when you search?
If you can selfhost I’ve gotten degoog setup and enjoy using it.
I’ve been happy with Kagi. Worth the subscription.
noai.duckduckgo.com is the best drop-in replacement for a free pre-AI search engine.
kagi.com is great if you can justify paying for it.
I’ve used both for a long time and have never missed Google, especially in its current state.
I use kagi for free but my dad is addicted to google so I might see if he likes it…
Honestly he’s in the demographic that might prefer the ai slop :/
If you aren’t paying for it, you’re the product being sold.
if you aren’t paying for it, you might be able to afford rent this month
If the grass is free; you’re the cattle.
