What search engine does everyone use. Duck duck go went all ai and shows pages of msn scraped news now so I've moved to Ecosia. But what else should I try?
Edit: I also added mojeek as an option
Extra edit. I'm happy for people that love DDG but you can stop trying to convince me. I'm asking about other search engines
#searchEngines
Hello :)
A question to those who know more about these things than i do (my knowledge is rather scarce in this regard): do you think it would be possible to create a distributed (or not) public search engine that would be free software and whose development and hardware costs would be financially supported solely by free subscriptions and that would only index web text, obviously without “AI” and without conveying any advert and without processing user data in any way and without applying "biases" or censorship, featuring basic search plus advanced search options including the possibility to sort results by publication date, and maybe even other things i've never seen on search engines?
The only calculations i've done are very rough, but i'll put them out there anyway: there seem to be about 4 billion web pages at present - https://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ - Let's say that on average the text useful for indexing one of these pages weighs 10,000 bytes, that would be 40 terabytes in total... I don't know, maybe it would work.
(Boosts appreciated)
The search engine @ecosia have a survey running. They want to know how you use their search engine and how you use AI.
You can tell them what you think about both of those things here: https://feedback.surveylab.com/38a/5f0d0476/
Imo, this is one of the best features of @Mojeek - Focus search.
Search Engine Roundtable: Google Search Mini Game Encourages Searchers To Search More. “Google Search is testing a new game in its search results to encourage searchers to search more. It is likely called the Google Search mini-game and it rewards searchers with badges when they ‘dive deeper into topics.'”
One good feature #Marginalia has is that it tells you before hand about "anti features" of a website.
Like in the attached screenshot, this website has got Tracking, Javascript and Ads.
It also has features to remove results which have got ads or Javascript. These features come very handy in the "modern" world wide web.
I really appreciate the developer's efforts. I hope #FOSS #SearchEngines could one day excel. And I hope support for languages other than English will be added soon enough.
Here's the thing: https://marginalia-search.com/
Has anyone else on a mission to find a daily driver search engine that isn't Google or Bing given Mojeek a look? It's been around since 2004, with its own crawler and index of somewhere in the realm of 6-7 billion pages, all run from a data center in the UK run by Custodian Data Centres, who claim its one of the greenest in the country (can't vouch for the veracity of that claim; it's all news to me).
They've also been lamenting the state of search on the web for years, and discussing the need for more independent search indexes, so they seem to be on the right side of the fight. Obviously, corporations are not your friends, so yeah, that could change at any moment, but while I like SearXNG (when my preferred instance is fully operational; it was barely usable for the last day or two), and Startpage when it's not telling me I'm blocked for acting like a bot or using a VPN I'm definitely not using???, they're both still meta engines aggregating results from the usual suspects (in the case of SearXNG, a very flexible one that lets the end user choose which sources they want/don't want results from, but still), so I think there's value in having at least one other actual independent crawler with its own index, and much like web browsers, it's an increasingly difficult thing to do from scratch without VC money (Cliqz tried, but couldn't survive the pandemic).
Anyway, I set it as my default engine in LibreFox yesterday, and am going to trial it for at least a few days to see how it goes. Will report my findings.
And here's some hashtag spam (please do share your info/experiences, if so inclined): #search #searchengines #googlesearch #duckduckgo #mojeek #TryMojeekSearch #searxng
As search engines in 2025 shift from providing links to (AI) answers — and all the angst that is causing web publishers — I thought I'd take a look at what search engines were like in 1998...one year before Google became popular. At that time search was seen as just one part of the portal experience. But little did AltaVista know, it wouldn't be the center of attention on @dannysullivan's Search Engine Watch for much longer. https://cybercultural.com/p/search-1998/ #InternetHistory #searchengines
Oh, before I forget, Happy International Take A Friend Or Family Members Phone And Install An Adblocker And Change Their Default Web Browser and Search Engine Away From Google Day 
(you can also do this any day of the year)
DuckDuckGo is DuckDuckGone.
See, this is what happens when you keep setting the AI & Search Assistant to ON whenever I open up my browser on a new day.
Let's see if Mojeek is any good as a search engine. I'm open to suggestions as it's always good to have options to explore.
Now, just need a new browser app for my phone. Any suggestions? Preferably without AI or at least something that honours user settings.
The browser I use on Android (Fennec F-Droid) just switched my default search engine back to Goggle, and what's worse, completely removed Mojeek and Brave as search options. This is an anti-feature!
It would be great if F-Droid builds of Android browsers stripped out the code that pulls dick moves like this.
@Mojeek What is best for YOU is what's best for THEM so they can continue to make products for YOU and sign big search deals with THEM.
Unfortunately, for you, even if they did put a search engine choice screen on the phone (which we know from past history of browser choice screens works really well for adoption of other products), then I doubt they would shortlist Mojeek in any other region than the UK, if at all.
"Google isn’t satisfied with its monopoly on the questions we search.
Google wants to use AI to monopolize the very answers themselves.
As one Google executive recently explained: “Organizing information is clearly a trillion-dollar opportunity, but a trillion dollars is not cool anymore. What’s cool is a quadrillion dollars.”
Google plans to use AI to consume and replace the open web.
I believe demolishing independent sites like mine was Google’s first step in clearing ground so it has space to rebuild search from the ground up for an “AI-first” future.
Google envisions a future where “Google does the Googling for you,” its AI and ads do the answering – and users never need to leave Google.
Google will just source information from a handful of sources and partner websites that it controls and selects – effectively creating an information cartel.
If Google can use AI to censor a travel website from the web arbitrarily and without opportunity for appeal – it can do the same to any source of information it wants.
And American citizens and Internet users everywhere will be worse off for it.
So while you may not really care about the plight of some random travel website getting censored, everyone should care about the way Google is deploying AI to build a censorship cartel that lets it control the flow of information online.
What follows is a lengthy summary of my experiences and my opinions as an independent publisher trying to survive in a monopolist’s information economy.
To start, let me explain how we got to this point where Google has the power to do this:"
https://travellemming.com/perspectives/ftc-letter-google-censors-indie-publishers-with-ai/
European Publishers Council stays true – to the tired old trope about “copyright theft”
A few weeks ago Walled Culture explored how the leaders in the generative AI world are trying to influence the future legal norms for this field. In the face of a powerful new form of an old technology – AI itself has been around for over 50 years – those are certainly needed. Governments around the world know this too: they are grappling with the new issues that large language models […]
#adtech #advertising #artificialIntelligence #bbc #bots #contextualAdvertising #eu #euipo #europeanPublishersCouncil #factChecking #genai #generativeAi #guardian #journalism #licensing #llms #searchEngines #slogan #training #uk #usCopyrightOffice
Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search
https://thenewleafjournal.com/catching-151-pokemon-in-google-search-04-17-25/
I discuss (link to video included) catching all 151 available Pokémon in an April 2025 Google Search-Pokémon catching minigame.
@hyde@lazybear.socialThis week we have @amin for the #OverUnder 012!
His views on the following topics:
- #Libraries
- #severance
- #searchEngines
- #MassSurveillance
- #Curry
#fediverse #blog #fediverse #web
#100DaysToOffload : 040/100
Does anyone know how to make DuckDuckGo actually exclude a search term? You used to be able to put a negative - on a word and it would exclude it from the search. Now I put that in and it includes it doubly so.
For example, I was searching the name of a game which happen to have a similar name to a character in a more popular game. No matter what I did enabled me to actually search for the game I wanted because it just spammed me with the popular game's character instead. Pages and pages of it.
It's probably time I found a better privacy featured search engine. DuckDuckGo seems to be going the same bad directions as others with "I know you said search this, but we know better than you do what you want" type crap. No. You don't. You're wrong.
@markwyner@mas.toTurns out you can circumvent AI search engine answers by using cuss words. Type any query that produces an AI answer. Add a cuss word and submit it again. No AI and mostly the same results.
The more you know. 
