Been trying to get away from DuckDuckGo because of their support of “AI” stuff, but come on, one of these isn’t even in English, and that’s what I have my language set to.
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Not even google tries to hide it
I use Qwant search
to use searx(ng) effectively u need to set up ur own preferences, not the default from ur ss, the instance caches and shows results from bing, ass. 2nd it use “auto” as default which will show personalized results based on the instance’s ip. u can change both just by setting up and save ur preferences for that instance
Instead of getting a search service with some ads on the side, you’re provided ads with search results sprinkled in
yup, literally just use a good seatch engine and you’ll find everything you need (idek what OP is using is that startpage?)
How’s Qwant in terms of search results and privacy/AI?
I’ve been using startpage (it’s an improvement over Mojeek, that was kinda unusable).
search results: they used to suck when i tried using qwant a year ago, but now theyre the exact same as on ecosia and google from my experience
privacy: this is what they say on their website
AI: havent spotted any ai featurea yet
I know. I’m trying not to use DuckDuckGo because of their AI support. I was told this was a good search engine to use instead, but it often spits random stuff back at me.
The
noai.duckduckgo.comURL is important to notice in the screenshot.deleted by creator
That’s my take as well. You can also remove AI results from Google by adding the &udm=14 string to force web results only, but it doesn’t absolve them of blame for how much they push AI. DDG deserves equal criticism.
It’s like old Reddit. Sure it still exists, but it only gets worse and worse as they double down on the version everyone hates until the majority don’t even know there’s another option. And there’s no guarantee they keep supporting the option that makes them less money.
Possibly, though as another commenter mentioned, using the noai URL for the moment is a good way to voice discontent. Not using it just falls into the “everyone uses google” narrative in a different way.
If DDG’s own poll didn’t spell that out for them, I don’t think they care.
Yeah, fair point. I wish DDG were going in a different direction.
Well that’s interesting as a poll result. 👍
The article behind the link at the bottom of the site shows that this is a marketing stunt
the poll numbers are still 😇
You really do either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.
SearXNG is a mixed bag to be honest…I find that Ononoki’s SearXNG delivers decent results…It’s a bit mixed at times with PieFed being the third option. Some topics are surfaced better than others, so your mileage will vary with SearXNG.
Using the No AI version of DuckDuckGo sends them a message that their bet on “AI” isn’t going to win them any accolades. It’s an easy way to push back. As they are tracking those metrics and people can see the numbers of how many users disapprove of AI.
Bing and yahoo are VERY bad, it seems they detect that they are being used through proxies, I made another comment for what i use in searxng.
DDG’s backend is really just Bing, though …
They give different results, it seems they have different treatment to the data, which is interesting. Startpage gives different results than google, duckduckgo gives different results than bing, but on the bigger picture, a bigger sample gives the statistically optimal result??? (closer to the source truth on the most probable good result) question mark, huge number theory on statistics.
(i’m drunk)
Bing in a sandboxed session yielded results identical to DDG in my experiments.
In searxng they don’t give the same results, bing brings some completely different stuff both on an selfhosted instance and on an public instance (it just gives random garbage), it seems proxying does some stuff to bings internal algorithm, as google is different than startpage on searxng.
Edit: a screenshot showing it.
Given the same methodology (search algorithm) a larger sample size gives a truer picture of what that methodology favors. If the methodology isn’t neutral or doesn’t bias in the same way as your desired outcome then a smaller sample size analyzed by a different methodology may provide better results.
Ah shit, I forgot to turn both those off. Ugh, I’ve been playing browser shuffle…Good catch!
What search engine?
It’s just Bing wearing a duck hat anyway
I use brave search, in the settings you can turn off ai answer and anonymous telemetry
I’ll just leave this here: https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/
Several useless slop paragraphs in that article - seems to have been written by LLM.
Human summary: Brave is a Chromium-based browser that is recommended by some for privacy. It’s created by homophobe and Republican donor Brendan Eich, who was asked by several Mozilla employees to resign and led to half of Mozilla’s board to step down. After OKCupid started pointing out his homophobia to Mozilla browsers users, he finally quit.
After that he created Brave with millions of dollars from amongst others Founders Fund’s FF Angel, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and Digital Currency Group.
In 2016 the “Brave Ad Replacement” was announced which would replace ads on pages with ones injected by Brave, paying in crypto.
Brave collected donations in their crypto on behalf of people like Tom Scott without asking them, and when Tom found out and told Brave to stop, Brave said “refunds are impossible”.
In 2020 Brave Browser silently injected referral links into URLs of crypto wallets containing Brave’s affiliate code.
By default they display sponsored images as the background for the home and new tab pages.
In 2021 Brave Browser exposed the .onion domains people visited as part of the DNS traffic so their ISPs could track users.
In 2023 Brave announced that they’d be selling their search data to AI companies, and prevented sites from opting out of this even if they asked not to be scraped by Brave.
In 2024 Brave deprecated their option for Strict fingerprinting protection.
Brave also paid for advertisement whenever users searched for “Firefox” in the Play Store, displaying “Forget the Fox”, which Brave’s VP (who promoted NFTs and FTX with AI) denied - meaning he was lying or didn’t find out before denying it.
it seems crazy to me that people still use brave–i’ve been reading nothing but terrible shit about them for years
Same, been there too. Still, it’s easy to miss articles on them, they only pop up once every so often. Same for Proton.
I might be a bit out of the loop, what about proton? I know they have their own AI chatbot, but did I miss anything else about them? AFAIK they are nowhere near Brave in terms of being utter garbage.
No, it’s nowhere near that, still the CEO came out in favor of Trump so I had to ditch them too.
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
Nice to find an up to date article, thanks
deleted by creator
So you know:
CEO is a anti-vaxxer anti-masker asshole, and incredibly pro-AI and pro-crypto.
Also the browser did at one point “accidentally” have a crypto farm built into it.
I’m so tired of the insistence that you have to agree with everything that the CEO does or says if you use a piece of software… You can turn off the ai and crypto in browser settings with a couple clicks. Also I’m talking about the search engine not the browser. I don’t use the browser purely because the Linux builds split mode doesn’t work nearly as clean as Zen, plus i prefer Firefox forks
I use it cause it’s a search engine that gives good results and that can disable ai answers… Until I’m able to get my server PC finished to selfhost searxng
Edit they actually slopped up the browser to the point it’s beyond disabling it. Literally just garbage
I could understand your point if they were literally the only option
But they’re not.
So why choose the worst option when better exist?
And you know how money works right? The CEO gets money for your continued usage of their products and services. So by using it, you directly support all their shitty views.
I don’t care what a CEO (for free software) thinks or says I care what the software does. Is the software good?.. The browser no. It’s complete garbage the search engine. Yeah it’s pretty decent. If the CEO’s garbage ideals bleed into the software like it does in the browser, yeah it’s trash. The search engine like almost every other mainstream search engine has AI answers except unlike a lot of others it lets you turn that off. It doesn’t skew results towards his ideals, doesn’t bury results under sponsored links, Has no crypto nonsense, it’s just a search engine. It’s not that deep
I searched up how to stop a stratis pool (Redhat knockoff ZFS) and Google gleefully gave me instructions to destroy the stratis pool, and then claimed there was no way to take down a stratis pool without destroying the data.
I think clicked on the top link which was a RedHat article that told you right from the beginning that it’s
stratis pool stop --nameOnly reason I had to even search was because I didn’t have the stratis CLI installed, so no manpage
We’re rapidly approaching a time where you have to curate your own list of helpful websites again, cause search engines are useless.
https://www.mankier.com/
Switch to Startpage, it’s actually pretty great
I like Startpage, but I had to switch to DDG because it was giving me captchas constantly for using a VPN.
I moved to startpage sinc eit was default when i moved to waterfox. Its mostly been good, but I’ve had a few times where it’s been painful slow.
+1
Searching “piefed” with Andisearch, it’s for me the only acceptable AI (Andi GitHub)
Its Summary
PieFed is a Reddit-like link aggregator and community platform in the Fediverse that launched in 2025[^1]. Users can subscribe to communities, post links, vote, and comment, similar to Reddit but without corporate control[1].
Key features include:
- Full Mastodon integration for cross-posting and interactions
- De-duplication that combines cross-posts and their comments in one place
- Better moderation tools compared to alternatives like Lemmy
- The ability to port communities between PieFed servers
- Clean, simple codebase written primarily in Python
According to users who have switched from Lemmy, PieFed offers improved user experience and solves many common complaints about other Reddit alternatives[2]. The platform fully integrates with the broader Fediverse, allowing Mastodon users to participate in discussions by mentioning PieFed communities in their posts[1:1].
The flagship instance is hosted at piefed.social, with the project’s code maintained on Codeberg[1:2][3].
Bing on searxng is shit, yahoo ultimately is bad too, I use this combination, it helps a lot:
This doesn’t look right:
I use searxng too, it’s decent mostly. Check your language settings?
I see you’re trying to solve the problem, that’s nice 🙂
But I had to laugh at the sites logic: Let’s detect users language, Ah! Must be country xyz, with knowing that: Go to chat GPT and ask there 😂
It’s such a bad search result, doesn’t matter if language is set or not.
Whaaat? That’s bizarre, I swear I had that set.
Nope, it wasn’t set. Still returned weird results so I’ll try that configuration the other commenter posted.
I hate subs, for any kind of entertainment most of all, but I think they’re necessary for VPN/private email.
I’m adding an another item to that list. Kagi. De-enshittified search results. My partner bought it, so it’s a shared sub, but I’m sold on it. It’s like it’s 2005 again, and that’s a good thing.
Also heard praise and got recommended personally to me.
The language detection is a bit bugged currently. Set default language to “all” in the UI (or set in the config file).
Use startpage or kagi or searxng
I’ve been genuinely happy with Kagi.
Same. So of course I’m just waiting for the news that they support eating babies or something.
I love that you can rewrite URLs. Reddit seems to block old.reddit.com from being indexed, but I have a URL rewrite in Kagi so you can site: reddit.com (or use a Reddit lense) then when you click links it goes to old.reddit.com
Literally the only case I use this but it’s the example Kagi uses so it was probably made specifically for this purpose.
