Abandon search engines, normalize asking your cousins your questions again
complicated for usa people though
Unless something has changed, that chart is incorrect. I stopped using startpage earlier this year when they announced the inclusion of ai.
Every single search provider mentioned includes AI as an option. Fortunately, they all gave an option to just turn it off. It’s annoying, but if they find that users want these AI summaries, they need to add them as an option to compete.
I wish more of them just had an option to highlight excerpts from pages or Wikipedia articles like google used to do exclusively. But I’m sure that harder to build :/
I think Google got tired of having to defend itself from lawsuits about Google copying and displaying the contents of web sites and not sending people to these web sites.
Do users actually want such AI summaries? Is there any good polling on this?
I mostly read about people being annoyed by companies pushing hard for AI, and trying to get rid of those unrequested summaries.
tuta seem to have missed the mark then, incorrect details and not including noai.duckduckgo
turning ai off is a valid (and welcome) choice, but most people don’t look at settings, the default is often ai on, and updates can also change them.
in Firefox browsers and its forks:

but then in a different part of settings:

the ai setting there was defaulted to on, even with ai supposedly completely turned off in the main ai section
So I would rather use a search engine (and browser) with the default that ai is trash.
I sometimes use that Marginalia search.
I’ve used DDG for years and really like it. I like it even more now that I’ve been using #emacs more because they have a text-based, or at least non-js, search page that works well in eww.
Also appreciate the Lite/HTML approach of ddg for quick searches on the phone. Much faster and lean.
Qwant used to have one too but it’s been scrapped somehow
I liked startpage until it broke for my setup, it does not work well with proxy’s, VPN and AdBlock. DuckDuckGo is my go to engine. Maybe in the near future I will setup searx. Also , in Germany there is ecosia but it also broke because of my setup.
Brave search was surprisingly good, like google when it wasn’t shit.
I could never trust Brave. You can’t be a search or browser company and also run an ad network. It’s a conflict of interest.
I’ve been using Qwant and it’s really good, I think it’s better than DDG, at least for results in Italian







