I’ve used DuckduckGo for at least a decade. When they started embedding their little AI summary thing at the top of the chat I knew it was coming. But recently, it seems when I search anything I get tons of the same slop, SEO pumped, AI generated info pages. There was a time when I would at least stumble upon an old HTML article from a university or something. Everything sucks now. Do they even make encyclopedia books anymore?
People are suggesting you PAY for a search engine. It’s been over.
Hey I skim on the free trial for kagi using disposable emails ;-;
The “World of Warcraft free player” grindset, eh?
I do not disdain people on account of their kagi recs, I simply point to it as an indicator of the dire straits of search engines, and shit.
boolean stuff don’t even work anymore, you used to get a direct quote when you used “” so search something
Yeah what’s that about? How can that function just cease to work? And we’re okay with it?
-[excludethisterm] means “humiliate me by continuing to surface results with just this term”
“Ya know what? Now I’m going to give you results with that term even more!”
It does still work on google, but you have to go all the way to verbatum mode. Super annoying.
Internet searching was going down the tube well before AI because of SEO slop but now AI has accelerated that tremendously.
The AI search assistant could be used to help mitigate the slop but you’re basically just having the AI sift through the bullshit for you and hope it doesn’t hallucinate some bullshit for you.
Search is dead for the foreseeable future. The “alternative” engines almost entirely use the Google or bing indexes and just give a layer of privacy (that is likely broken by Google having some secret fingerprinting technique)
Some, like DuckDuckGo, ecosia, and kagi, append the index with their own but still ultimately rely on Google and bing indexes to a significant degree. Though some of these are moving towards entirely independent indices (may take years)
Alternatively you can look at other countries indices, which are independent: baidu (China), yandex (Russia), mojeek (uk)
But ultimately web search is dead. Advertising and commercialization killed it. Advertising ruins everything, anyone who works in marketing should be put on a rocket and shot into the sun
Heard good things about https://github.com/searxng/searxng, but that requires some way to host it. And you’ll probably end up tinkering to get it right, but pretty cool nonetheless.
It’s better from a privacy standpoint but ultimately still depends on other search engines indices (which ultimately are largely Google and bing)
Searxng is a meta search engine, it basically sends your query to a bunch of providers and then ranks its own results based on criteria (eg does it appear in results from multiple providers)
I also forgot that brave has its own index, I don’t know much about it. I don’t fuck with brave stuff
Yes agreed. But it does give you tools that let you control how results are presented, which can help to create a good experience and remove AI results.
but that requires some way to host it.
As i mentioned elsewhere in the thread, you do not have to slefhost searx/searxng, there are lots and lots of public instances.
My conspiracy theory is that they enshittified search to make AI look better.
How is this a conspiracy theory? Google literally made search worse to boost ad revenue. Why wouldnt engines do the same for their “gonna replace everyone and everything” llm?
It’s a conspiracy theory in the sense Operation Condor is; well documented fact openly admitted to by the culprits but if you tell this to a normal person they will think that you’re insane.
Normal people are strange and disconnected from reality
Definitely, my conspiracy is the same because a comrade on YouTube explained “It was better at being a search engine because google was so bad, it is still worse than old google but better than current one”
I thought they were pulling my leg, but someone recently recommended Dogpile to me and, apparently it’s 1996 again, because it’s the best search engine I’ve used in years. No AI spam, no SEO spam. Just slightly bad search results.
Dogpile
What strange twitter. A few posts from 2026 that make no sense, and before that last post was 2015.
Looking at their explanations, they seem like a meta search provider. So if their upstream sucks, how cna they be any good?
Dogpile is a search engine from 1996 whose gimmick was that they’d aggregate all the other search engines and get more results. They were the best briefly, before Google showed up and was so much better than all the other search engines that you’d never want to mix it with something else.
I have no clue why Dogpile is good right now. Some strange accident?
I’ve also tried it, inspired by you, and wow wtf! This is amazingly good, on par if not better than Kagi lmao
Pretty much. Even noai.duckduckgo is 99% AI slop.
it doesn’t remove ai results, it moreso disables ddg ai features like the chat bot or whatever.
I know it’s been long coming, but this has been something I’ve noticed in the past few months. It’s impossible to find ANY human-written sources, stuff that had at least 30 seconds of a person’s time. I’ll struggle through 10, 20 even 30 pages before giving up. I’d love to know if there’s any way to exclude that stuff.
i have had to resort to asking real people questions that are even slightly complicated.
And then they just go prompt the AI anyway. NO DUDE YOU’RE A DOCTOR, I’M ASKING YOU
heard SearxNG is good but you have to host it yourself
You don’t have to host it yourself, there are plenty of public instances.
SearxNG has lots of free hosts online, there is a list of them at https://searx.space/ . I’ve had pretty good experiences with it, it has less slop, but it can also miss things.
Jynx, you owe me a beer!
The thing about searxng is that it’s essentially a search engine aggregator, so it will only ever be as good as the regular search engines it’s pulling results from. Like searx isn’t doing its own searches and giving you better results than google, ddg, etc., it’s outsourcing your search to those other search engines and showing you a compilation of their results without you having to interact with them. Of course you can fine tune how it does that and choose which actual search engines it gives you results from, but it’s still ultimately search results from those primary engines. So its major benefit is privacy and all the good stuff that comes from that like no ads and not getting tracked. But if the only things that turn up on google, ddg, bing, etc., Are slop, then that’s all you’re going to get with searx as well. That said, I still highly recommend it, it’s the only thing I use for searching these days.
Yeah no magic bullets as indexing the web is expensive and increasingly stuff is in walled gardens because everyone wants monopoly.
Use google’s verbatim mode. intitle: “index of” is also like a cheat code. In verbatim mode it gets you only documents from publicly available databases and sometimes finds you cool stuff people maybe didn’t want to share publicly
example intitle: “index of” /pdf “media literacy”
You got google’s ai which lies to you sourcing ai websites that lie to you.
My tip is to limit date range to the end of 2022 and hope nothing important in the field has happened since.
My only option left is academic databases
Idk if it’s just me but I generally still find what I’m looking for easily enough? You have to scroll past the paragraph of AI slop now but it’s still not too hard to find stuff generally. The HTML university websites will still come up if you’re looking for academic stuff that doesn’t exist elsewhere.
Of course there is stuff that you can’t search, but it isn’t really Google’s fault that my private trackers don’t show up on their site
