this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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I want to avoid it but with google making sure that search results get worse and worse I'm in a bit of a pickle. Other search engines still feel lile they're a bit behind though
Duck duck go
Unfortunately, it's not better and also shows slop
You can at least turn off its built-in summaries. But some filtering to detect AI generated articles would be nice.
You can ask it to turn off the summaries. It still shows them but you can ask.
You know what I was thinking about the big summary at the top and completely forgot about the summaries in the result descriptions. But I'm not sure if that's DDG doing it, Bing (who they use as a backend), or the sites itself since I only see it on results from reddit and such.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over a decade, the results are fine, and !bangs are extremely useful for piping queries directly to specific sites, !w for wikipedia, !aw for archwiki, etc. The Duck.ai function is a recent addition, and it can be easily disabled if you don’t want it. By default it doesn’t usually pop up by itself. You can also use lite.duckduckgo.com for a much leaner search and absolutely no AI.
Just switched to noai.duckduckgo.com. Thanks stranger!
Ah, I was unaware of that shortcut, thanks for the heads up, and you’re welcome! 🦆
ddg is great :)
I was trying to use it for a long time, but the results are never fine for me. The situation when I search for something specific, the duck shows me nothing, and the google shows me exactly what I need is far too often for me to completely switch.
Granted, I don't keep cookies, I use all the adblocks possible, and I disabled google's LLM bullshit, otherwise google is borderline unusable.
!g to pipe to Google if you must, I rarely need to.
Personally when I use it, unless it's something trivial, I always end up doing exactly that.
https://udm14.com/
You can also get a search extension in firefox (probably others as well but I haven't looked)
It essentially strips the bullshit out and just shows you search results.
If you're willing to pay money then Kagi is a great alternative. They claim they don't collect or share your data. Though, Kagi isn't very good for local search results and probably never will be.
You've probably heard this before but do consider alternatives like Startpage and Qwant. It's not flawless but I've found it's definitely better.
I'm gonna go a step further and recommend searx :)
I use my boyfriends own browser. Boyfriend, please explain it:
Soooo, it's called searXNG. It's a metasearch engine I host locally. It searches across multiple search engines, like duck duck go and others. And then shows the results as a normal webpage. It also changes your "fingerprint" per every search, and every search/result is proxied through the server. If you wanna try it out, you can use (public instance): searx.bndkt.io But you can easily host it locally from the source or with docker.
I'm using searx, too, but google's results still stand to be some of the most relevant.
Have you tried Ecosia?
Not OP. I've been using Ecosia for years and was glad they didn't do the AI summary shit so far... But a few days ago I got an AI summary on Ecosia as well. I fear they're also hopping on this train and in that case I'll look for another search engine.
Isn't ecosia just using google's results?