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.
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.
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.
This is in beta, not available for all users and you can also disable it easily: https://support.ecosia.org/article/994-ai-overviews
Isn’t ecosia just using google’s results?
As far as I know they are using Bing. They’ve started building their own search index last year in a partnership with Qwant.