• MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.works
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    12 hours ago

    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.

    • Squizzy@lemmy.world
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      2 minutes ago

      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.

  • inbn@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    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.

      • Tekdeb@lemmy.zip
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        4 hours ago

        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.

  • GreenBeard@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    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.

  • Rioting Pacifist@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

  • TabbsTheBat (they/them)@pawb.social
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    1 day ago

    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

    • AlchemicalAgent@mander.xyz
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      1 day ago

      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.

  • Mereo@piefed.ca
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    1 day ago

    I host searXNG on my home server. It’s heaven. I get better results Google.

  • faltryka@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    I’ve been using kagi and even replaced the default search on my iPhone with it. Works great

    • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      That’s odd, the entire first page of results is about the software when I just searched on Bing. The official site was the top result.

      • Pommes_für_dein_Balg@feddit.org
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        14 hours ago

        Oops, I already conditioned myself to ignore the top result cause it’s offset from the others by Bing’s design.
        Looks like a sponsored or AI result.