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·
    7 小时前

    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
    14·
    1 天前

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

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

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    15·
    1 天前

    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
    17·
    2 天前

    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·
    1 天前

    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.

  • Geodes & Gems@lemmy.ml
    3·
    1 天前

    DuckDuckGo’s No AI version, but I haven’t really tried anything else, maybe that’s a show of it’s quality?

  • SpatchyIsOnline@lemmy.world
    7·
    1 天前

    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·
    1 天前

    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.