I’m looking for something that just gives good results with their own engine, not proxying google or yahoo, without LLMs being involved.

I’ve used startpage and have my own searxng instance self hosted. But both use mostly google results with just a nicer frontend.

I was looking Kagi as an alternative. But they seemed to move to become another AI company, bundling their subscription to the search engine with a subscription to an LLM, so I’m not paying for that.

  • isyasad@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 days ago

    Startpage, but I haven’t really been happy with it. Takes results directly from Google or Bing I think, and sometimes makes me do a captcha if I’m on a VPN. At least there’s no A.I.
    I also have Duck Duck Go, Google, Wikipedia, Wiktionary and a few other searches set to prefixes in Firefox so if I search “w bananas” it’ll search Wikipedia, or “dd bananas” for Duck Duck Go, etc.

    If I’m searching for something to read about basically and I think it’s on Wikipedia, I’ll usually start there with a direct search using my shortcut and not even touch a general search engine.

  • dan1101@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    3 days ago

    Been using Duckduckgo, it’s ok. Like the early days of Google.

    Now I just have to finish de-Googling email and file storage.

      • dan1101@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        18 hours ago

        So-so, I’m trying to evaluate Proton before fully leaving Google. Google Maps will be tough to leave, and stuff like Android Auto is nice.

        • cosmos8188@leminal.space
          1·
          2 hours ago

          I can recommend startmail for emails, I use it alongside the proton stack. But I do have to agree google maps is the toughest to leave - OSM derivatives just dont give that much flexibility or a great search tool.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    18·
    3 days ago

    I wouldn’t say Kagi has “moved to become an AI company”.

    They host some open weight models, which you can use with your subscription (which hasn’t increased in price or dropped features since they added AI access), but you’re not forced to use AI ever, and they’re not collecting your searches or prompts to feed into training.

    They’ve taken a pretty skeptical stance on AI from the start. You can disable AI features completely, so you don’t even accidentally use them. But even if you leave them enabled, you have to opt into invoking AI by ending your query with a question mark.

    Edit: Also, they downrank content that has been flagged as AI generated: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html

  • Dingaling@lemmy.mlEnglish
    181·
    3 days ago

    duckduck for 90%.

    Google only when dd fails me.

    To tbh, many of the things I used to use a search engine for I now use a variety of chatbots. No adverts, just answers. (I suspect this won’t last)

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    9·
    3 days ago

    I use DuckDuckGo.

    I don’t prefer AI searching, but if I’m in a hurry I’ll look at the AI summary. You can disable it by going to noai.duckduckgo.com. I just don’t bother with that. If I don’t like the AI summary, I don’t expand it.

  • SpatchyIsOnline@lemmy.world
    7·
    3 days ago

    I’ve been using Qwant for about a year now, they and Ecosia built their own EU based index a while ago. I’ve been pretty happy with it

    They did introduce an AI overview thing a few months back, but it can be permanently turned off with two clicks

  • GreatWhiteBuffalo41@slrpnk.netEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    I tried Kagi for a month. It was decent. For $5 and only 300 searches I felt limited. I’m not saying I was limited, I felt that way. I found myself going to other search engines for some searches.

    I liked ecosia for awhile but I’ve had to turn off the AI multiple times. I have no idea why it keeps turning back on, so that’s why I stopped. Start page was ok. I’m currently using SearX Paulgo and it seems decent.

  • BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com
    5·
    3 days ago

    After a couple of years using Kagi, I’ve been giving Uruky a try for the past two weeks. It’s a European meta-search engines which uses European indexes.

    In my experience, setting Serper (a UK-based privacy preserving proxy to Google Search) as the first index to use gives the best responses, but I still happen to go back to Kagi once in a while (like, maybe 2-3 times in the past week).