I'm preaching to the choir here, but for those who don't know
https://www.qwant.com/ (France)
https://www.ecosia.org/ (German)
Both of the above are currently in partnership as well.
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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There are a few probs with qwant unfortunately and I assume ecosia might be the same. It isn't available in all countries so it's sometimes blocked when I am on a VPN. The performance is shocking on the other side of the world. Terrible latency. Often fails completely to return results. Then the search results aren't really good enough either. Tends to return a lot of links from similar sources like it doesn't have much of an index. Its ok for really simple mainstream searches but I regularly need to fall back to no AI ddg or udm14 google.
Unless I want a clanker response. Actually I never want a clanker response but web indexing has become so poor in the pursuit of ad revenue then AI that sometimes it's hard to get anything useful out of search queries these days. It's very frustrating.
Interesting, I've never heard those points before. They're both super fast for me, and give me really good results.
I was using DDG for many years, but the results were often super bad and I hadn't noticed until I started using Google search again. Then I started using Ecosia and Qwant, and the results have been sometimes better and sometimes worse than Google -- mainly only worse whenever I need Google Maps for its various features around businesses that OpenStreetMap is missing.
I am in Australia. Searches on local content and niche tech subjects don't do very well compared with other engines. It might be lack of tuning more than index and I am sure it will improve. Latency might be due to lack of local servers or resources or my choice of browsers but Qwant breaks all the time. It runs a lot better if I keep ad blocking on. Noticeably faster and more reliable though still high latency on the first result showing. If you turn ads on to support smaller companies you immediately get punished. Ad supported businesses aren't compatible with good quality service unfortunately, no matter where they are based.
It is amazing that Google was so usable for so long really. Their search people must have fought hard to balance out product quality against the demands of the money people for a long time. I think every service that follows in Google's footsteps will inevitably repeat all their mistakes.
I recommend trying Qwant, Ecosia and others though. It is my default browser search at the moment, mostly because it isn't US based. It might be all you need.
Google prioritised advertising over content to the point where it's chrome browser and YouTube have become unusable
The ads on YouTube are insane but does chrome have ads now? Where would they even go?
I switched to Bing since Google blocked my VPN provider. I guess I'm part of the reason. Also, their search results suck balls with sponsored links all over the main page
Duck Duck Go
They somehow are giving me absolutely garbage search results that only seem to use a single word from my search terms and most of them feels like ad websites and AI generated first.
It's not great on DuckDuckGo right now for me.
Bing created by Microslop is quite bad for privacy as well.
I thought this was wild, that no way it could have dropped THAT much: hell, I still search for things and didn't rely on LLMs.
Then I remembered I switched my default engines to Duck Duck Go, and Startpage,
A LOT of people out there just read whatever tho google AI tells them on their search. They've been trained that the answer is always the 1st non-ad link on Google. And now the thing at the top of a Google search is their LLM answer.
That's horrifying. That thing is wrong waaaaaaay to often to trust it. Like, easily more than half the time and that's me googling shit I'm not even that knowledgeable about.
Searched for ‘is Death Stranding 2 on Geforce Now’ (streaming games service).
Answer it gave ie ‘yes, absolutely’. With a link.
The link? An Nvidia post about GPU drivers that had been updated to work with the game since it just launched on PC. Basically, because there was SOME mention of the game on the Nvidia site, it just went ‘yep’ without actually understanding the question.
Basically, if I’d bought the game based on that answer, I wouldn’t be able to play it…
I watched a guy use gemini to do a delicate system edit then melt down on Fb when he bricked his home automation system.
When people told him to stop using fckn gemini he started just blindly clinging to people and demanding answers from them instead ("I have three blinking yellow lights. What does that mean????").
You can't fix stupid desperation
I'm in a couple discords that have tech support channels and it's always annoying when people like that come in. "I already catastrophically fucked my shit up,. Why aren't you assholes helping?" Okay buddy, let me just hop back to the past real quick and stop you from doing that.
I mean if they just admitted what they fucked up and asked if there was any way out, you'd be a lot kinder. But instead they just jam their dick in there fucking with shit they have no business touching then start screaming for everyone ELSE to fix it like they pay us to.
We really don't tell these people to go fuck themselves enough.
That's the thing. People try be kind but these guys jump in there in a panic and when they don't instantly get an answer they're all like "AREN'T ANY OF YOU ASSHOLES GOING TO HELP ME!!!?". We'd be helping if we could dude but you already fucked yourself. Getting all aggressive with us isn't going to change matters.
I've noticed a trend that recently it feels like people assume everyone else is getting the answers and instant help whenever they ask and they think just them are being left out. I keep hearing it "other people get whatever they ask for" as if it is true. It seems to be a self excuse to hate everyone prematurely and yet still expect everything from them.
Everyone has gotten to used to seeing the internet as the solution to everyone else's problem.
I always feel kind of good about it if it takes some effort to get an answer to an issue I'm having. If I've been searching through docs and troubleshooting for hours and finally give up and ask for help and someone just answers right away I feel like a dumbass.
Bud, i've spent 30 years in IT, a lot of it client facing. It's not necessarily the internet, just plain human nature.
I mean the internet is probably not helping, jfgi became ubiquitous and now useless, and a lot of old school tech blogs either removed their content from AI or search engines just buried their shit in favour of marketing so people are kinda feeling like their crutches have been kicked out from under them.
Yeah that is fair. The most accessible library in the world has basically been burned down so scraps of it can be sold back out.
Honestly at this point if i find a useful guide for something ii'm likely to need again in the future i just print it to pdf now. The ol' habits developed back when things would get regularly TOSed return to good stead.
(Also i document by habit anyway)
So what the new business model is?
- Steal content from creators
- Train AI model using that content
- Sell this content to users as original
When creators go out of business and there's nothing to steal, how will this business continue?
Yes. Also combined with:
- replace all entry level jobs with AI
- run out of experienced people because nobody new can learn the skills required
- ???
- profit
But you see, for a brief moment, we made the shareholders very rich, and that was a beautiful moment totally worth everything.
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They can't see past their next set of financial statements. And the government wants those content creators to fail so they can control all information.
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The first thing I do when searching google is to scroll past that AI shit they put at the top and look for a valid link to a valid website.
I changed all of my default search engines to https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ and internet searches have been much better
Do yourself a favor and don't use Google at all
Here are alternatives
- Brave Search or DuckDuckGo They do have similar AI features but you can disable them.
- Or, Just use StartPage, It's basically shows you Google results but without any if Google's bloat nor their tracking.
edit; stupif typ0
https://udm14.com/ , you can also add "&udm=14" to your normal google link so you don't have to rely un udm14.com, there should be a tutorial on the site
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Search engines are pretty much redundant because they don’t return what we are looking for.
They cooked themselves.
But what if what your are looking for is AI generated articles that don't provide any trustworthy answers or top 10 lists of products that their manufacturers paid the site to figure on the list? Google is still the best for that.
What if what I'm looking for is an article I can't read without subscribing, removing my adblock, and/or accepting a bunch of cookies? Or one that sends me away entirely because that's easier than being GDPR-compliant? Surely you'd click on those results.
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at least some of this has to be because people use other search engines
Google search doesn't actually return useful material anymore
I tried kagi a while back and liked it so much I subscribe now. Google messed up the one thing they ever did right.
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Most of the time i use search engines to get to wikipedia. Now i have to add "wiki" to most of my queries because wikipedia wont even show up on the first page.
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No amount of bad reports or low profitability will convince these people AI is not the end-all-be-all they think it is.
Who uses Google in this day and age? They haven't had good results for a decade or so.
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