I’ve been using DuckDuck Go since leaving Google Search, but that seems to be the first step away. I’m not keen on their AI assist. I tried Start Page, but the first four results were ads. I don’t mind paying a small fee for good search. So Brave Search or Kagi?
Have you tried adding the no AI version of Duckduckgo to your browser search options? I believe it’s just adding “https://noai.duckduckgo.com/”.
It’s definitely been a QOL improvement for me.
Nice!!!
I did it a week ago and it’s been great not having that AI summary at the top. I don’t know if this also disregards AI for image searches as there seemed to be an additional fix for that.
Absolutely Kagi. Its worth the small fee and has so KANU useful features that make combing through the bullshit way easier. We use it daily.
What a nice thread!
I add here https://www.ecosia.org/
I’m glad for this thread because I use duck duck Go but I hate it. Become trash in the last year.
Searx has been excellent for me, but it’s not the best option if you want to search by date relevancy. I’ll find that I combine DDG and Searx mostly because of this.
You can just enable ddg within the searxng instance
If you don’t mind keeping a cookie around, DDG has search settings that let you turn off AI Assist and advertisements.
SearXNG is good. If you’re not self-hosting, make sure to have a shortlist of alternative instances. I like instances that pull from google, but those also tend to suffer from rate-limiting.
If you don’t mind paying, Kagi’s the gold standard imo. Been using it for years. The pricing has been pretty garbo at times but they’ve settled on a good model now. Used it extensively for research back when I was a freelance writer and it’s stuck around as my general-use search engine. It’s great for research, functionally really well designed.
ononoki , or any other free instance of searxng on the web.
