Still shocked to see people in 202X pull up a web search and it’s Google 🤢
Better alternative?
Literally any one
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.
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.
I havent used google for a long time for searching. Nice to know it isnt really needed anymore.
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 You may want to read A look at search engines with their own indexes, although it’s about a year out of date now.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 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: https://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.
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.
