Which other trustworthy search engines are there? And I don’t mean some different frontend or a meta search engine like ddg, sp, kagi, searx(ng), etc… that mostly just use googles, bings or even yandex and beidu results?
Ages ago I configured and hosted yacy for myself, but that was a different time… Are there any real alternatives? With mayor internet companies like cloudflare, social media sites and many others restricting the access to the net and information, searching becomes more and more impossible if you aren’t a huge corporation…
The two criteria I suggested were “not saturated with ads and AI trash” (technically just the latter would satisfy OP’s problem), and DDG meets both of those with no problem. Its AI “assistant” and its ads can both be trivially disabled. I use DuckDuckGo because I love its frontend and because it gives me fewer problems than Google did. I’ve only ever used alternative search engines that piggyback off the major ones (as you listed: DDG, Startpage, and SearX), so someone else would have to answer that for you.
Kagi has an AI search option which IIRC is on by default – or at least was at one point – where it’ll try to also synthesize an answer and stick it in a box with the results, but you can just turn it off in your preferences. I have it off.
There may be a day when we have AI assistants that are so good that their summaries are better than looking at the original source, but I’d put a high bar on that, and think that we’ve got a way to go.
Using a search engine that isn’t saturated with ads and AI trash also solves this problem.
I stopped using Whoogle (Privacy engine using Google search) because of the bad search results. Google’s fault of course.
Trying SearxNG now.
Which other trustworthy search engines are there? And I don’t mean some different frontend or a meta search engine like ddg, sp, kagi, searx(ng), etc… that mostly just use googles, bings or even yandex and beidu results?
Ages ago I configured and hosted yacy for myself, but that was a different time… Are there any real alternatives? With mayor internet companies like cloudflare, social media sites and many others restricting the access to the net and information, searching becomes more and more impossible if you aren’t a huge corporation…
The two criteria I suggested were “not saturated with ads and AI trash” (technically just the latter would satisfy OP’s problem), and DDG meets both of those with no problem. Its AI “assistant” and its ads can both be trivially disabled. I use DuckDuckGo because I love its frontend and because it gives me fewer problems than Google did. I’ve only ever used alternative search engines that piggyback off the major ones (as you listed: DDG, Startpage, and SearX), so someone else would have to answer that for you.
Got any recommendations?
DuckDuckGo
I don’t know if Bing’s search results are better than Google’s.
They all suck.
Startpage if you like Google, DuckDuckGo if you like Bing.
Kagi
Gotta say, Kagi has been great. It’s helped me a lot in work just by Being able to prioritise search Results and rank certain sites higher
Kagi has an AI search option which IIRC is on by default – or at least was at one point – where it’ll try to also synthesize an answer and stick it in a box with the results, but you can just turn it off in your preferences. I have it off.
There may be a day when we have AI assistants that are so good that their summaries are better than looking at the original source, but I’d put a high bar on that, and think that we’ve got a way to go.
Searx.space