cloudskaterI'm just trying to search for a website...
Ep1cFac3pa1mI know. I’m trying not to use DuckDuckGo because of their AI support. I was told this was a good search engine to use instead, but it often spits random stuff back at me.
circuitfarmerThe
noai.duckduckgo.com URL is important to notice in the screenshot.
I use brave search, in the settings you can turn off ai answer and anonymous telemetry
I’ll just leave this here: thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/
Why I recommend against Brave
If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it's even listed on
it seems crazy to me that people still use brave–i’ve been reading nothing but terrible shit about them for years
Same, been there too. Still, it’s easy to miss articles on them, they only pop up once every so often. Same for Proton.
I might be a bit out of the loop, what about proton? I know they have their own AI chatbot, but did I miss anything else about them? AFAIK they are nowhere near Brave in terms of being utter garbage.
No, it’s nowhere near that, still the CEO came out in favor of Trump so I had to ditch them too.
Thanks for the reply and source! I am not a fan of this, but not quite convinced to switch yet. May I ask what you switched to or what alternative email providers you could recommend? From my not very in-depth research, self-hosting an email server seems to be quite a nightmare.
I was weary of self-hosting email myself too, didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole. After some searching, I’ve landed on migadu.com. I just renewed the subscription after the first year, was 19$ a year for the micro plan, which is more than enough for my needs. Not sure why they use dollars though, as they are a Swiss company.
So far no problems, have ~10 of my domains hooked up for email.
The only downside I can spot is it’s bring-your-own-domain, so take that into account.
Appreciate the suggestion, I will look into it. I don’t have my own domain yet, but I guess it is about time…
bright_side_Nice to find an up to date article, thanks
Several useless slop paragraphs in that article - seems to have been written by LLM.
Human summary: Brave is a Chromium-based browser that is recommended by some for privacy. It’s created by homophobe and Republican donor Brendan Eich, who was asked by several Mozilla employees to resign and led to half of Mozilla’s board to step down. After OKCupid started pointing out his homophobia to Mozilla browsers users, he finally quit.
After that he created Brave with millions of dollars from amongst others Founders Fund’s FF Angel, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and Digital Currency Group.
In 2016 the “Brave Ad Replacement” was announced which would replace ads on pages with ones injected by Brave, paying in crypto.
Brave collected donations in their crypto on behalf of people like Tom Scott without asking them, and when Tom found out and told Brave to stop, Brave said “refunds are impossible”.
In 2020 Brave Browser silently injected referral links into URLs of crypto wallets containing Brave’s affiliate code.
By default they display sponsored images as the background for the home and new tab pages.
In 2021 Brave Browser exposed the .onion domains people visited as part of the DNS traffic so their ISPs could track users.
In 2023 Brave announced that they’d be selling their search data to AI companies, and prevented sites from opting out of this even if they asked not to be scraped by Brave.
In 2024 Brave deprecated their option for Strict fingerprinting protection.
Brave also paid for advertisement whenever users searched for “Firefox” in the Play Store, displaying “Forget the Fox”, which Brave’s VP (who promoted NFTs and FTX with AI) denied - meaning he was lying or didn’t find out before denying it.
See now. This is much better and informative. Just saying he’s an anti-vaxxer and pro-ai pro-crypto. Especially like the last 3 to 4 things.
gwl [he/him]So you know:
CEO is a anti-vaxxer anti-masker asshole, and incredibly pro-AI and pro-crypto.
Also the browser did at one point “accidentally” have a crypto farm built into it.
I’m so tired of the insistence that you have to agree with everything that the CEO does or says if you use a piece of software… You can turn off the air and crypto in browser settings with a couple clicks. Also I’m talking about the search engine not the browser. I don’t use the browser purely because the Linux builds split mode doesn’t work nearly as clean as Zen, plus i prefer Firefox forks
I use it cause it’s a search engine that gives good results and that can disable ai answers… Until I’m able to get my server PC finished to selfhost searxng
I don’t care what a CEO thinks or says I care what the software does. Is the software good?.. The browser no. It’s complete garbage the search engine. Yeah it’s pretty decent. If the CEO’s garbage ideals bleed into the software like it does in the browser, yeah it’s trash. The search engine like almost every other mainstream search engine has AI answers except unlike a lot of others it lets you turn that off. Has no crypto nonsense, it’s just a search engine. It’s not that deep
I could understand your point if they were literally the only option
But they’re not.
So why choose the worst option when better exist?
Really not how that works… Do you use a phone? Guess you agree with child labor then cause they make money from your purchase
Did you read this part at all?
I’m pretty sure the answer is no.
I could understand your point if they were literally the only option But they’re not. So why choose the worst option when better exist?
Oh I read it, and don’t care. Because all y’all have done is go on about how bad of a person I am for using a search engine, but no mention of any of these “great alternatives” I would love to hear some of these great alternatives that you speak of. If they can provide a better searching experience then I’d be happy to give them a shot.
Brave search does what I need it to so if another does it better I’d switch. But oh no my searches contribute pennies to someone bad that uses said pennies to make their browser worse to use. I have bigger things to worry about than a CEO whose ideals don’t effect the thing I’m using
It’s just Bing wearing a duck hat anyway
blinfabianyup, literally just use a good seatch engine and you’ll find everything you need (idek what OP is using is that startpage?)
YliasterHow’s Qwant in terms of search results and privacy/AI?
I’ve been using startpage (it’s an improvement over Mojeek, that was kinda unusable).
search results: they used to suck when i tried using qwant a year ago, but now theyre the exact same as on ecosia and google from my experience
privacy: this is what they say on their website
AI: havent spotted any ai featurea yet
ZerushMojeek has improved a lot in last times. Is a good alternative, but always good to use several search engines for different tasks, all they have its + and -, eg Startpage is good for image search, Andi is fine for semantic and concept searches with excelent summaries, Mojeek and Qwant for general websearch, etc.- In the Vivaldi forum you can find the, maybe, most complete list of search engines out there which you can test (all include the needed insert code to add these direct to the list in your browser - 19 page thread)
OP is using SearxNG, an Open-Source, Self Host able metasearch engine which is not going to work well unless you set your own settings correctly and tailor them to how you use the web. StartPage is just proxied google results. SearxNG can proxy StartPage, but these results are from Bing.
GitHub - searxng/searxng: SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.
SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. - searxng/searxng
Yeah I didn’t realize my settings weren’t configured right, so I did so, came back today and found they were switched back! That’s why I was struggling. I have SearxNG in my whitelist for cookies too, so no idea why that’s happening. With the settings changed, it works great!
lol no I just didn’t realize I had my stuff configured wrong. But I was searching for Piefed with the intent to join bc Lemmy’s devs suck and yeah, shit’s good. So if you want, you can consider this reply an ad for Piefed, tho it’s actually a neutral endorsement :3
Lol, just did the same thing.
Use startpage or kagi or searxng
blitzen
DaveI love that you can rewrite URLs. Reddit seems to block old.reddit.com from being indexed, but I have a URL rewrite in Kagi so you can site: reddit.com (or use a Reddit lense) then when you click links it goes to old.reddit.com
Literally the only case I use this but it’s the example Kagi uses so it was probably made specifically for this purpose.
Bilb!Same. So of course I’m just waiting for the news that they support eating babies or something.
that is searx, searxng is pretty much the same
I hate subs, for any kind of entertainment most of all, but I think they’re necessary for VPN/private email.
I’m adding an another item to that list. Kagi. De-enshittified search results. My partner bought it, so it’s a shared sub, but I’m sold on it. It’s like it’s 2005 again, and that’s a good thing.
Also heard praise and got recommended personally to me.
I tried it out one time because another user here, Tal, usually put it into their very well made comments, so I tried it out.
Yeah, I’ve been paying for it for almost two years(?) and I never have these difficulties any more. Very happy customer. :)
RimuThis doesn’t look right:
I use searxng too, it’s decent mostly. Check your language settings?
Whaaat? That’s bizarre, I swear I had that set.
Nope, it wasn’t set. Still returned weird results so I’ll try that configuration the other commenter posted.
I see you’re trying to solve the problem, that’s nice 🙂
But I had to laugh at the sites logic: Let’s detect users language, Ah! Must be country xyz, with knowing that: Go to chat GPT and ask there 😂
It’s such a bad search result, doesn’t matter if language is set or not.
The language detection is a bit bugged currently. Set default language to “all” in the UI (or set in the config file).
Switch to Startpage, it’s actually pretty great
xvertigox
SushiI like Startpage, but I had to switch to DDG because it was giving me captchas constantly for using a VPN.
Wait, it is?
enbiousenvyStartpage is System1
Instead of getting a search service with some ads on the side, you’re provided ads with search results sprinkled in
mlgI searched up how to stop a stratis pool (Redhat knockoff ZFS) and Google gleefully gave me instructions to destroy the stratis pool, and then claimed there was no way to take down a stratis pool without destroying the data.
I think clicked on the top link which was a RedHat article that told you right from the beginning that it’s stratis pool stop --name
Only reason I had to even search was because I didn’t have the stratis CLI installed, so no manpage
We’re rapidly approaching a time where you have to curate your own list of helpful websites again, cause search engines are useless.
www.mankier.com
www.mankier.com
Searching “piefed” with Andisearch, it’s for me the only acceptable AI (Andi GitHub)
Its Summary
PieFed is a Reddit-like link aggregator and community platform in the Fediverse that launched in 2025[^1]. Users can subscribe to communities, post links, vote, and comment, similar to Reddit but without corporate control[^3].
Key features include:
- Full Mastodon integration for cross-posting and interactions
- De-duplication that combines cross-posts and their comments in one place
- Better moderation tools compared to alternatives like Lemmy
- The ability to port communities between PieFed servers
- Clean, simple codebase written primarily in Python
According to users who have switched from Lemmy, PieFed offers improved user experience and solves many common complaints about other Reddit alternatives[^7]. The platform fully integrates with the broader Fediverse, allowing Mastodon users to participate in discussions by mentioning PieFed communities in their posts[^3].
The flagship instance is hosted at piefed.social, with the project’s code maintained on Codeberg[^3][^5].
[^3]: PieFed - Join the Fediverse [^5]: pyfedi - Codeberg [^7]: Lemmy vs PieFed - Lemmy.ca
