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.
Not even google tries to hide it
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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I use Qwant search
to use searx(ng) effectively u need to set up ur own preferences, not the default from ur ss, the instance caches and shows results from bing, ass. 2nd it use "auto" as default which will show personalized results based on the instance's ip. u can change both just by setting up and save ur preferences for that instance
Instead of getting a search service with some ads on the side, you're provided ads with search results sprinkled in
yup, literally just use a good seatch engine and you'll find everything you need (idek what OP is using is that startpage?)
How's Qwant in terms of search results and privacy/AI?
I've been using startpage (it's an improvement over Mojeek, that was kinda unusable).
search results: they used to suck when i tried using qwant a year ago, but now theyre the exact same as on ecosia and google from my experience
privacy: this is what they say on their website
AI: havent spotted any ai featurea yet
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.
The noai.duckduckgo.com URL is important to notice in the screenshot.
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.
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.
DDG's backend is really just Bing, though ...
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)
Bing in a sandboxed session yielded results identical to DDG in my experiments.
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What search engine?
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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
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/
Switch to Startpage, it's actually pretty great
I like Startpage, but I had to switch to DDG because it was giving me captchas constantly for using a VPN.
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.
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Searching "piefed" with Andisearch, it's for me the only acceptable AI (Andi GitHub)
Its Summary
PieFed is a Reddit-like link aggregator and community platform in the Fediverse that launched in 2025[^1]. Users can subscribe to communities, post links, vote, and comment, similar to Reddit but without corporate control[^3].
Key features include:
- Full Mastodon integration for cross-posting and interactions
- De-duplication that combines cross-posts and their comments in one place
- Better moderation tools compared to alternatives like Lemmy
- The ability to port communities between PieFed servers
- Clean, simple codebase written primarily in Python
According to users who have switched from Lemmy, PieFed offers improved user experience and solves many common complaints about other Reddit alternatives[^7]. The platform fully integrates with the broader Fediverse, allowing Mastodon users to participate in discussions by mentioning PieFed communities in their posts[^3].
The flagship instance is hosted at piefed.social, with the project's code maintained on Codeberg[^3][^5].
[^3]: PieFed - Join the Fediverse [^5]: pyfedi - Codeberg [^7]: Lemmy vs PieFed - Lemmy.ca
Bing on searxng is shit, yahoo ultimately is bad too, I use this combination, it helps a lot:
This doesn't look right:
I use searxng too, it's decent mostly. Check your language settings?
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.
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.
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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