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.
Google is garbage. It’s a complaint I’ve had for quite a while now. It used to be good at searching and obeying modifiers (-, “quotes” and the like). It would give you tens of pages of results and the result you wanted would almost always be on the first page. Now all it does is give you, in order: AI results that are incomplete or wrong, the best monetized youtube results, sponsored results, and then shitty SEO site results, and you’ll be lucky if any of that contains what you’re looking for. So you try “-“ to eliminate some garbage, but google takes that as incentive to offer you even more of what you don’t want. Then you try “search term” in quotes to be specific, and google offers zero results. Like in the billions of web pages that exist, nobody has ever written or discussed the thing you’re looking for? You get zero because it isn’t monetized or something.
Google is no longer a search engine, it’s an ad-server returning profitably monetized web pages.
I’ve been happy with Kagi. Worth the subscription.
If you can selfhost I’ve gotten degoog setup and enjoy using it.
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 DuckDuckGo for the past several years.
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.
Kagi is great.
If you aren’t paying for it, you’re the product being sold.
If the grass is free; you’re the cattle.
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 :/
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 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.
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.
duckduckgo uses bing doesn’t it? the results seem mostly identical to me
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.
I’m pretty sure yes, if you use ddg news there’ll be a lot of results from MSN, owned by Microsoft
I fully switched to presearch.com
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
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
I host searXNG on my home server. It’s heaven. I get better results Google.
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.
There’s other search engines that are less Ai heavy.
Or you could go with SearXNG
These days I just go straight to Wikipedia when possible
