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.
Switch to Startpage, it's actually pretty great
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Bing on searxng is shit, yahoo ultimately is bad too, I use this combination, it helps a lot:
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.com URL is important to notice in the screenshot.
im guessing op is aware that you can turn ai off, but generally opposed to using duckduckgo since they are generally a pro ai company
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.
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!
It's just Bing wearing a duck hat anyway
What search engine?
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/
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.
very helpful ty!
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 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.
This doesn't look right:
I use searxng too, it's decent mostly. Check your language settings?
Whaaat? That's bizzare, 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.
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.
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.