We started a year or two ago as well, but our son is autistic and it’s hard to get him to change. He finally seems to have settled in now.

RIP bozo

Did someone say Bonzi Buddy?

I suggest moving to any other search engine, if anyone hasn’t already. If duckduckgo isn’t to your taste, startpage.com uses Google’s database without pushing any of this nonsense.

We use noai.DuckDuckGo.com now.

Been using DDG for years now, and have since turned off AI. My only issue with DDG, StartPage, and Ecosia, is that they don’t do their own indexing (AFAIK). I still use them, but have been looking into Kagi and Brave (I know they have their own issues as well) as I think they index independently of Google or Microsoft. With not having an independent index, then the search engine is at the mercy of the companies that do. Such as is Google wants to remove or deprioritize something, it would also be seen in StartPage. Again, that my understanding and it may be wrong.

The largest fully independent generalist search engines are Yandex (which is no better than Google/Bing, unless you want something that doesn’t deprioritize sites for DMCA reasons) and Mojeek. You may want to read A look at search engines with their own indexes, although it’s about a year out of date now.

I have routed duckduckgo.com to noai.duckduckgo.com on my computer

I like this option a lot, but it’s way more frustrating to set this as a default search engine on (all?) mobile browsers than it should be.

You’ve probably done it already, but a quick howto for anyone else (on Firefox Mobile):

• Three dot menu -> Settings -> Search -> Default search engine
• Scroll to the bottom, press + Add search engine, put what you like in the Name box
• in the search string URL box put this: noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s
• Press Save, then select your newly named option for normal and private tabs as you like.

Kagi is the best few bucks I spend each month.

I’ll probably end up going back to Kagi when I’m working again. Can’t justify the extra expenses right now between them and a few others I’d like to pay for.

Another good one and you can also self-host your own instance, is SearXNG.

We’ve got lumps of it 'round the back.

Amazon has done something similar as well. When you search an item on it it now defaults to running it in their AI and then you need to click “show results” if you don’t wanna see the preview.

And even when you get past that, it takes some scrolling (or page-mangling with browser add-ons) to get past the sponsored garbage. They insert some of that in the actual results without telling you, too, I discovered today while doing another junk cleanup pass. I now have over thirty “kill anything matching this xpath” and two or three “set the height of this to zero pixels” directives for Amazon, making it one of the worst sites I can still be arsed to deal with at all.

This infuriates me. I don’t give a fuck what your AI says. I’m also enraged because I canceled prime and they decided to renew it anyways

they need to be sued for deceptive marketing practices to be honest. The ways it tries to sneak you resubscribing to it without your knowledge is super deceptive. My gramp has accidentally subscribed at least 4 times now when he goes to place a normal order they have like 3 different locations that toggle on where you need to keep telling them no you don’t want a free trial, and then we don’t actually find out about it till months after because he is very old fashion and doesn’t always check things.

Boycotting Amazon is easy and fun.

An even autocompletes product names and then no results found.

I hit the same thing on git yesterday, used the “Main” search thing not realizing it was their copilot shit. it took ages to think, then spew out a pile of shit with the links to what I actually wanted buried in a wall of text - how the fuck is that better?

For you or the shareholders?

Copilot sneaking in is really obnoxious, and common.

I just tried this prompt on Gemini and it worked really well:

Give me search results like a 1999 Google search on the content of the modern web for: “your search terms here”

Just checking, do you mean GitHub? Git definitely doesn’t have copilot

yes github

It's better for them because it does two things. It keeps you on the page longer (which allows them to steal more data from you or sell you more ads), and it normalizes their LLM.

It makes sense that they did away with that button, since they long ago did away with the thing that button actually does.

Wonder if this will impact my searxng install.

All good I have been using Ecosia for a long time now.

I just went back to ecosia after trying 5 different SearXNG instances that didn’t work for me.

Still shocked to see people in 202X pull up a web search and it’s Google 🤢

The average person doesn’t even know there’s other options. So, it’s working as designed.

I guess that’s the benefit of a virtual monopoly.

Unfortunately

I was more an AskJeevs guy myself

Why? There hasn’t been a search engine worth the bandwidth it eats since infoseek got shut down.

Uh, Kagi, Mojeek, DDG, Ecosia, searx (self-hosted or non). That’s just off the top of my head

For general searches they all worked pretty until just recently for some reason

If by “just recently” you mean “around 2010”, then sure.

When’s the last time you used Kagi? I alternate between that and DDG and dude Kagi is probably the best one I have ever tried. Better than google even.

Better alternative?

Literally any one

I just tried this prompt on Gemini and it worked really well:

Give me search results like a 1999 Google search on the content of the modern web for: “your search terms here”

Not sure how long that will continue to appear un-biased and un-polluted by SEO, but it did pretty good for the things I tried.

related lol: arstechnica.com/…/google-says-gemini-has-reached-…

Except anyone doing a Google search is actually “entering a prompt to gemini”. Healthy skepticism is as valuable as gold in the time of AI and deepfakes.

The LLM has no idea whether you entered text into gemini.google.com or google.com, it’s all the same to it. LLMs don’t even know what time and date it is unless you feed it to its context.

As far as it is concerned, you are on the Gemini web app. The rest of the page is search results, but who knows what special sauce Google put in there.

Lol now I know why my work just rolled out mandatory, company wide classes to learn Gemini. Even the janitorial staff will need to take it. Giving it to corporations for forced adoption to boost the user count!

Say it with me:

Sunk Cost Fallacy!

Udm14.com still works if you absolutely have to use Google search. Otherwise try Mojeek.

I havent used google for a long time for searching. Nice to know it isnt really needed anymore.

Google handles over 90% of all worldwide web searches. Bing is in second with 5% and DuckDuckGo at under 1%. Statcounter 2026 numbers.

My Google search still offers up an ‘AI mode’ button.