They are choosing to abstain from using artificial intelligence for environmental, ethical and personal reasons. Maybe they have a point, writes Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi
I want to avoid it but with google making sure that search results get worse and worse I’m in a bit of a pickle. Other search engines still feel lile they’re a bit behind though
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over a decade, the results are fine, and !bangs are extremely useful for piping queries directly to specific sites, !w for wikipedia, !aw for archwiki, etc. The Duck.ai function is a recent addition, and it can be easily disabled if you don’t want it. By default it doesn’t usually pop up by itself. You can also use lite.duckduckgo.com for a much leaner search and absolutely no AI.
I was trying to use it for a long time, but the results are never fine for me. The situation when I search for something specific, the duck shows me nothing, and the google shows me exactly what I need is far too often for me to completely switch.
Granted, I don’t keep cookies, I use all the adblocks possible, and I disabled google’s LLM bullshit, otherwise google is borderline unusable.
I use my boyfriends own browser.
Boyfriend, please explain it:
Soooo, it’s called searXNG. It’s a metasearch engine I host locally. It searches across multiple search engines, like duck duck go and others. And then shows the results as a normal webpage. It also changes your “fingerprint” per every search, and every search/result is proxied through the server.
If you wanna try it out, you can use (public instance): searx.bndkt.io
But you can easily host it locally from the source or with docker.
Not OP. I’ve been using Ecosia for years and was glad they didn’t do the AI summary shit so far… But a few days ago I got an AI summary on Ecosia as well. I fear they’re also hopping on this train and in that case I’ll look for another search engine.
I want to avoid it but with google making sure that search results get worse and worse I’m in a bit of a pickle. Other search engines still feel lile they’re a bit behind though
Duck duck go
Unfortunately, it’s not better and also shows slop
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over a decade, the results are fine, and !bangs are extremely useful for piping queries directly to specific sites, !w for wikipedia, !aw for archwiki, etc. The Duck.ai function is a recent addition, and it can be easily disabled if you don’t want it. By default it doesn’t usually pop up by itself. You can also use lite.duckduckgo.com for a much leaner search and absolutely no AI.
I was trying to use it for a long time, but the results are never fine for me. The situation when I search for something specific, the duck shows me nothing, and the google shows me exactly what I need is far too often for me to completely switch.
Granted, I don’t keep cookies, I use all the adblocks possible, and I disabled google’s LLM bullshit, otherwise google is borderline unusable.
!g to pipe to Google if you must, I rarely need to.
Personally when I use it, unless it’s something trivial, I always end up doing exactly that.
https://udm14.com/
You can also get a search extension in firefox (probably others as well but I haven’t looked)
It essentially strips the bullshit out and just shows you search results.
I use my boyfriends own browser. Boyfriend, please explain it:
Soooo, it’s called searXNG. It’s a metasearch engine I host locally. It searches across multiple search engines, like duck duck go and others. And then shows the results as a normal webpage. It also changes your “fingerprint” per every search, and every search/result is proxied through the server. If you wanna try it out, you can use (public instance): searx.bndkt.io But you can easily host it locally from the source or with docker.
I’m using searx, too, but google’s results still stand to be some of the most relevant.
Have you tried Ecosia?
Not OP. I’ve been using Ecosia for years and was glad they didn’t do the AI summary shit so far… But a few days ago I got an AI summary on Ecosia as well. I fear they’re also hopping on this train and in that case I’ll look for another search engine.