Just add Wikipedia to your search bar

...why don’t you just go to Wikipedia to begin with? I’m honestly asking. URLs still exist.

If you add '!w' to the end of your word in the address bar it takes you directly to wikipedia.

For example: buffalo buffalo buffalo !w

But what if what your are looking for is AI generated articles that don't provide any trustworthy answers or top 10 lists of products that their manufacturers paid the site to figure on the list? Google is still the best for that.

I use DDG and SearXNG several times per day. It's better at finding information in StackOverflow and Reddit threads than directly searching in those sites and it's the only way I know how to actively seek out websites I haven't been referred to by anyone.

If you have a technical problem and enter "reddit" in you search often you find help. But this is so stupid. 

I'm guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.

If it's something that Wikipedia can help me with, that's still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.

Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.

Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.

Funny how Google couldn't defeat seo spammers and yet claim they can keep AI safe. We are so fucked

Seriously! The most I use one is for the spelling of words not already programmed into my swipe keyboard. And even then it still manages to fuck it up on occasion!

Yup,i use perplexity as my first port of call for most searches. Not because it’s good - it’s not, I’d estimate it’s wrong around 80%of the time - but because it’s still better than the alternatives

You don’t want 8 pages of the same 4 media conglomerates telling you why you should totally buy the thing they reviewed and totally don’t have investments in/own everything they’re serving up, while they make a commission off their clickbait?

I tried kagi a while back and liked it so much I subscribe now. Google messed up the one thing they ever did right.

I dropped them for DDG over a year ago. Never have had a cause to regret.

It’s AI overviews which result in almost no clicks and people using LLMs like ChatGPT.

Former SEO here. I know so many people that now just ask ChatGPT things as their search engine. Many SEOs are now trying to SEO LLMs.

It really doesn't, I have to do a quarter of my searches over in ddg after startpage refuses to return answers it used to. Startpage is google run through a proxy server.

Yes. Also combined with:

1. replace all entry level jobs with AI
2. run out of experienced people because nobody new can learn the skills required
3. ???
4. profit

But you see, for a brief moment, we made the shareholders very rich, and that was a beautiful moment totally worth everything.

They can't see past their next set of financial statements. And the government wants those content creators to fail so they can control all information.

Advertising obviously. /s

A LOT of people out there just read whatever tho google AI tells them on their search. They've been trained that the answer is always the 1st non-ad link on Google. And now the thing at the top of a Google search is their LLM answer.

DDG lets you just turn off the AI crap.

https://udm14.com/ , you can also add "&udm=14" to your normal google link so you don't have to rely un udm14.com, there should be a tutorial on the site

Unfortunately, most of the first page of results is often AI slop at this point...

Do yourself a favor and don't use Google at all

Here are alternatives

1. Brave Search or DuckDuckGo They do have similar AI features but you can disable them.
2. Or, Just use StartPage, It's basically shows you Google results but without any if Google's bloat nor their tracking.

edit; stupif typ0

If you set your default browser search engine to this, it gives a much cleaner Google search result, without AI crap.

https://google.com/search?udm=14&q=%25s

I tried other searches like DDG and the like, but Google still gives the best results... If you bypass all their junk.

Can i interest you in Kagi? Its a great web browser and AI is optional.

I changed all of my default search engines to https://noai.duckduckgo.com and internet searches have been much better

The first you should use other browser like ecosia or qwant

There are a few probs with qwant unfortunately and I assume ecosia might be the same. It isn't available in all countries so it's sometimes blocked when I am on a VPN. The performance is shocking on the other side of the world. Terrible latency. Often fails completely to return results. Then the search results aren't really good enough either. Tends to return a lot of links from similar sources like it doesn't have much of an index. Its ok for really simple mainstream searches but I regularly need to fall back to no AI ddg or udm14 google.

Unless I want a clanker response. Actually I never want a clanker response but web indexing has become so poor in the pursuit of ad revenue then AI that sometimes it's hard to get anything useful out of search queries these days. It's very frustrating.