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.

  • Geodes & Gems@lemmy.ml
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    2 hours ago

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

  • dan1101@lemmy.world
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    7 hours 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.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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    8 hours 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.ml
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    9 hours 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)

    • kuiskaaja@lemmy.ml
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      4 hours ago

      does it use staan in every country (unlike qwant and ecosia, for now)?

      cus those search results seem quite good, maybe even better than qwant (which i use)

      if this is what staan is like, i’m very much hyped for the rollout for qwant and ecosia :)

  • GreatWhiteBuffalo41@slrpnk.net
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    8 hours 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.

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    9 hours 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
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    8 hours 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

  • Remy Rose@piefed.social
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    7 hours ago

    I have a huge list of small independent ones added to my browser, but I’m not near it and don’t remember most of them. Marginalia-Search is really good though

  • BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com
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    9 hours 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).

  • ZapBeebz_@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    I swapped to Qwant over the summer and have had no complaints at all! Their ai-overview is very easy to turn off (and it stays off permanently, afaik) and the results are pretty comprehensive!