I currently use Startpage, but i’m wary of their Vanish AI. Or at least tired of seeing ads for it. I use Wiby and Marginalia already, but their indexes aren’t really broad enough for much of what i need.
I figure this is a good place to ask because nobody here is going to recommend anything with an Al overview or other such crap.
Looking at my browser history, what i search for is technical problems with Linux, linguistics, games i play, CAD, fonts, recipes, typography, all sorts of stuff. Hence the desire for a general purpose search engine.
So what do you folks use? Is it just noai.duckduckgo.com for everyone?
I’d recommend Kagi if you don’t mind paying. They have optional AI features, but they also have anti-AI features… Not sure how this community feels about Kagi but It works great and also let’s you customize results and widgets, so you can disable ai summaries and image result boxes for example, and pin/raise/lower/block domains, or have custom ‘lenses’ that narrow search criteria: particularly useful for technical / reference searching
I second kagi.
thirded, couldn’t be happier with it.
Fourthed. I’m a rotten cheapskate who pirates movies and wears thrift store clothes and mooches meals from friends, but I pay for Kagi and it’s worth more than the price.
Do you have unlimited or starter? I feel like 300 searches a month is nothing. I’d be happy to pay $5 a month but $10 seems steep to me.
I would try the 300 and upgrade to unlimited if you hit the limit, personally.
I personally search over 20 times a day so I suggest using the free searches they give you then deciding whether the 10$ is worth it.
personally I mix using ddg with kagi for the “what’s the name of that website again?” or “where’s that place?” kind of searches that I do regularly and find I stay below the 300 searches easily. depends on your usage case ofc