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.
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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
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)
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.
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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).
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.
Ecosia and Duck duck go
I use duckduckgo for convenience, maybe I shouldn’t.
I use yandex for image-search.
Ecosia
I use xPrivo, base in Luxembourgh.
It uses the EU made Index from Ecosia and Qwant and own.
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Hey, I’m really sorry for the late reply.
As I understand it, staan is the same for everyone? So do Ecosia and Qwant use it too, along with the other indexes.
According to its own statements, Xprivo uses only staan and one that’s entirely its own.
DuckDuckGo’s No AI version, but I haven’t really tried anything else, maybe that’s a show of it’s quality?
I primarily use Ecosia because it plants trees. I also use Mojeek, it’s indipendent.
For other alternatives with their own engine - the main ones are Yandex, Mojeek, and Qwant. DuckDuckGo is good, but most of their results come from Bing.
Kagi is priced well for what you get. Search engines are very expensive to run. You don’t have to pay for the premium AI, and the pricing of the starter ($5/month for 300 searches) and pro ($10/m for unlimited searches) plans hasn’t been affected by AI. They’ve remained the same price ever since they launched in 2022.
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
