Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.
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noai.duckduckgo.com, for at least one alternative.
CoMaps or Openstreetmaps instead of Google Maps.
ProtonMail/ProtonDrive instead of gmail, gdrive.
There are lots of alternatives, we just need to use them and tell others to use them as well.
DuckDuckGo is AI opt-out, and for me that’s a non-starter.
I’ve personally found Kagi the best search alternative.
Kagi is based in the US and uses the Yandex (Russia) search-index as part of their stack. I am trying to stay away from both. But yeah, their search results are nice :)
Google was done a long time before AI came about. I quit using it as a primary search engine probably 5 or more years ago.
People ask me how I like DDG and I’m like. It’s better than google these days. Not because DDG got better, but because google got worse.
So, Bing
searxng fixes a lot of this. it aggregates and consolidates results from many search engines of your choice. no ai. no ad
Happy local user for a couple of years now, you can pipe it through a VPN with gluetun for extra fun. Super lightweight, run it on my T580 laptop. Doesn’t fix the enshittified web, but at least you can blacklist the worst of it, along with many other tricks.
I’ve been considering self hosting my own searxng, curious how much space do you find it taking up?
Image is 270MB, under 1MB in its volume.
Thanks just set up my instance! Works great, tysm
Most welcome, have fun.
Users who were quoted in the article:
- Sionn Achog, retired teacher 76, Dublin
- Peter Warb, 75, UK
- Jose Garcia Jr, 40, recovery coach, Dallas, Texas
- Alan Caruana, consultant, 62, Malta
- Eleazar Eke, electrical engineer, 67, Onitsha, Nigeria
- Catherine Weber, former political analyst, 57, Oregon
- Mark Johnson, 52, software engineer, London
- Samuel Lieberstein, 90, retired teacher, Cherry Hill, New Jersey
- Sean Peters, document processor, 41, Portland, Oregon
According to Wikipedia, the CIA’s median age statistics for 2024 for each of the countries that had a respondent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age
- Ireland: 40.2
- United Kingdom: 40.8
- United States: 38.9
- Malta: 43.5
- Nigeria: 19.3
The respondents seem awfully non-representative of the larger population, considerably older. There isn’t a single person who was below the median age for their country, and many who were far above.
Don’t they have to be old to have used “Old Google”? It’s about 30 years old, seems appropriate that the users of old Google would be 40s at minimum, yeah?
No?
I’m younger than those people and I still remember using Open Directory, HotBot, MetaSearch, AltaVista and the rest.
For that matter, I remember the Internet before the World Wide Web when we used WAIS, Archie, Veronica and Jughead to search FTP and Gopher sites.
“Old Google” to me ended around the time they merged with Double Click. It’s got significantly worse three times since then.
I miss the actual old Google, where the searches wouldn’t intentionally show you a lot of things you don’t want in order to keep you searching longer for their ad revenue. The one where if you put something between “quotes” it would only show you results with those specific words, and you coul -minus a word to specifically exclude results that contained that word.
Google has been a piece of shit for like 15+ years now. They’re even making android suck.
I remember being taught about search operators in school. Of course they’d take that away, it’s such a powerful way to get exactly what you’re looking for, no bullshit.
I think in older search engines the results were not rated at all, and you could use syntax similar to SQL.
Using them as sort of a Web index. Would be very useful if not for all the bots and SEO sites.
Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo and others gradually reduced that to just a set of keywords.
