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Been trying to get away from DuckDuckGo because of their support of "AI" stuff, but come on, one of these isn't even in English, and that's what I have my language set to.

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[-] Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.world 91 points 3 months ago
[-] blinfabian@feddit.nl 13 points 3 months ago

yup, literally just use a good seatch engine and you'll find everything you need (idek what OP is using is that startpage?)

[-] Turret3857@infosec.pub 10 points 3 months ago

OP is using SearxNG, an Open-Source, Self Host able metasearch engine which is not going to work well unless you set your own settings correctly and tailor them to how you use the web. StartPage is just proxied google results. SearxNG can proxy StartPage, but these results are from Bing.

[-] cloudskater@pawb.social 3 points 2 months ago

Yeah I didn't realize my settings weren't configured right, so I did so, came back today and found they were switched back! That's why I was struggling. I have SearxNG in my whitelist for cookies too, so no idea why that's happening. With the settings changed, it works great!

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[-] cloudskater@pawb.social 9 points 3 months ago

I know. I'm trying not to use DuckDuckGo because of their AI support. I was told this was a good search engine to use instead, but it often spits random stuff back at me.

[-] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 75 points 3 months ago

The noai.duckduckgo.com URL is important to notice in the screenshot.

[-] LostWanderer@fedia.io 9 points 3 months ago

SearXNG is a mixed bag to be honest...I find that Ononoki's SearXNG delivers decent results...It's a bit mixed at times with PieFed being the third option. Some topics are surfaced better than others, so your mileage will vary with SearXNG.

Using the No AI version of DuckDuckGo sends them a message that their bet on "AI" isn't going to win them any accolades. It's an easy way to push back. As they are tracking those metrics and people can see the numbers of how many users disapprove of AI.

[-] potatoguy@mbin.potato-guy.space 6 points 3 months ago

Bing and yahoo are VERY bad, it seems they detect that they are being used through proxies, I made another comment for what i use in searxng.

[-] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

DDG's backend is really just Bing, though ...

[-] potatoguy@mbin.potato-guy.space 5 points 3 months ago

They give different results, it seems they have different treatment to the data, which is interesting. Startpage gives different results than google, duckduckgo gives different results than bing, but on the bigger picture, a bigger sample gives the statistically optimal result??? (closer to the source truth on the most probable good result) question mark, huge number theory on statistics.

(i'm drunk)

[-] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

Bing in a sandboxed session yielded results identical to DDG in my experiments.

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[-] LostWanderer@fedia.io 3 points 3 months ago

Ah shit, I forgot to turn both those off. Ugh, I've been playing browser shuffle...Good catch!

[-] tyler@programming.dev 4 points 3 months ago

What search engine?

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[-] bright_side_@piefed.world 24 points 3 months ago

Instead of getting a search service with some ads on the side, you're provided ads with search results sprinkled in

[-] potatoguy@mbin.potato-guy.space 21 points 3 months ago

Bing on searxng is shit, yahoo ultimately is bad too, I use this combination, it helps a lot:

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[-] gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 3 months ago

Switch to Startpage, it's actually pretty great

[-] privatepirate@lemmy.zip 7 points 3 months ago

I like Startpage, but I had to switch to DDG because it was giving me captchas constantly for using a VPN.

[-] SushiSushi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 months ago

I moved to startpage sinc eit was default when i moved to waterfox. Its mostly been good, but I've had a few times where it's been painful slow.

[-] arcine@jlai.lu 3 points 3 months ago

Owned by an ad company = TRASH.

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[-] Zerush@lemmy.ml 16 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)
[-] rimu@piefed.social 14 points 3 months ago

This doesn't look right:

BsekH64gsGg0fJ1.png

I use searxng too, it's decent mostly. Check your language settings?

[-] bright_side_@piefed.world 5 points 3 months ago

I see you're trying to solve the problem, that's nice 🙂

But I had to laugh at the sites logic: Let's detect users language, Ah! Must be country xyz, with knowing that: Go to chat GPT and ask there 😂

It's such a bad search result, doesn't matter if language is set or not.

[-] cloudskater@pawb.social 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Whaaat? That's bizarre, I swear I had that set.

Nope, it wasn't set. Still returned weird results so I'll try that configuration the other commenter posted.

[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 13 points 3 months ago

Not even google tries to hide it

[-] arcine@jlai.lu 12 points 3 months ago

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

Also you can turn off ads on ddg.

[-] mlg@lemmy.world 12 points 3 months ago

I searched up how to stop a stratis pool (Redhat knockoff ZFS) and Google gleefully gave me instructions to destroy the stratis pool, and then claimed there was no way to take down a stratis pool without destroying the data.

I think clicked on the top link which was a RedHat article that told you right from the beginning that it's stratis pool stop --name

Only reason I had to even search was because I didn't have the stratis CLI installed, so no manpage

[-] mech@feddit.org 6 points 3 months ago

We're rapidly approaching a time where you have to curate your own list of helpful websites again, cause search engines are useless.
https://www.mankier.com/

[-] Zephorah@discuss.online 11 points 3 months ago

I hate subs, for any kind of entertainment most of all, but I think they’re necessary for VPN/private email.

I’m adding an another item to that list. Kagi. De-enshittified search results. My partner bought it, so it’s a shared sub, but I’m sold on it. It’s like it’s 2005 again, and that’s a good thing.

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[-] dragon_gm@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

to use searx(ng) effectively you'll need to set up your own preferences, not the default

from the screenshot, the instance caches and shows results from bing only, ass.

it also use auto as default which will show personalized language results based on the instance's ip (although it's mainly yours), change that to all

you can do both just by changing and saving your preferences. for example here's mine

[-] Renat@szmer.info 3 points 3 months ago

I use Qwant search

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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
336 points (95.7% liked)

Fuck AI

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