Google seems hell-bent on AI; DuckDuckGo lets you easily disable AI search. Try it out.
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
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 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
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for the past several years.
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 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.
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.
If you can selfhost I’ve gotten degoog setup and enjoy using it.
I’ve been using kagi and even replaced the default search on my iPhone with it. Works great
