I've been using DuckDuckGo for the past several years.
this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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noai.duckduckgo.com is the best drop-in replacement for a free pre-AI search engine.
kagi.com is great if you can justify paying for it.
I've used both for a long time and have never missed Google, especially in its current state.
Google has been getting worse since before AI, it's because it's advantage stemmed from indexing the public web, but as the web turned into a half a dozen walled gardens it lost that edge.
It's losing customers to AI so it's trying to clone their features, pretty, but it's been trying this with just regurgitating Wikipedia for a while.
I don't know for sure but I suspect internally the incompetent middle management layer are pushing AI usage as a metric and forcing engineers to ruin their best product because management don't know the value of Google (because they are by and large morons who use AI).
The AI usage can be avoided with other search engines but the walled garden problem is here to stay, on a closed Internet search is always going to suck.
These days I just go straight to Wikipedia when possible
DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia are the two big ones that tend to come up in these kind of questions, although there's a handful of smaller search platforms out there as well. Bing is even worse than Google at this point. If I recall correctly Ecosia uses a custom search algorithm but still relies mostly on Google's index at this time, DuckDuckGo is entirely independent.
duckduckgo uses bing doesn't it? the results seem mostly identical to me
If I recall correctly it queries the Bing API among other niche sources for indexing and acts as a proxy for ad purposes, so while there's a lot of Bing results, it's not one-to-one. Unless they changed things recently, it's possible I missed a press release.
I'm pretty sure yes, if you use ddg news there'll be a lot of results from MSN, owned by Microsoft
I fully switched to presearch.com
I've been using Kagi as well to good success. I just wish I could pay for just the search portion and fully disable the assistant, but at least it's optional
Google seems hell-bent on AI; DuckDuckGo lets you easily disable AI search. Try it out.
Duckduckgo is just bing search
I host searXNG on my home server. It's heaven. I get better results Google.
Oh they're planning to replace the standard link view with AI overview in general :3 source
There're quite a few alternative search engines; I personally use duckduckgo, but startpage is also good, I hear, I've been trying it out in cases where ddg doesn't get my desired results :3. There's also searXNG which is more technical, but quite good in terms of fetching results from a bunch of stuff, and a lot of people I know swear by kagi, but that one is a paid service. Those are the main "big" ones I see around. Of course they're by far not the only ones
Going to pop in with a vote for Kagi. They are paid, but they also run their own index so they don't use Google at all. Well worth it.
There’s other search engines that are less Ai heavy.
Or you could go with SearXNG
Bing is still worse. Today I searched Rufus on Bing.
The website of the project wasn't even on the first page of the results.
Kagi is far and away the best search option right now.
Yea but kinda seems like I have to pay for privilege.
Someone always pays for your search.
It's only a question of who, and what do they want you to see when you search?
doesn't seem very popular but ive been using etools.ch lately and it's decent. it also works without javascript