this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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I’ve used DuckduckGo for at least a decade. When they started embedding their little AI summary thing at the top of the chat I knew it was coming. But recently, it seems when I search anything I get tons of the same slop, SEO pumped, AI generated info pages. There was a time when I would at least stumble upon an old HTML article from a university or something. Everything sucks now. Do they even make encyclopedia books anymore?

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[–] danisth@hexbear.net 14 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Heard good things about https://github.com/searxng/searxng, but that requires some way to host it. And you'll probably end up tinkering to get it right, but pretty cool nonetheless.

[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 14 points 3 days ago

but that requires some way to host it.

As i mentioned elsewhere in the thread, you do not have to slefhost searx/searxng, there are lots and lots of public instances.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It’s better from a privacy standpoint but ultimately still depends on other search engines indices (which ultimately are largely Google and bing)

Searxng is a meta search engine, it basically sends your query to a bunch of providers and then ranks its own results based on criteria (eg does it appear in results from multiple providers)

I also forgot that brave has its own index, I don’t know much about it. I don’t fuck with brave stuff

[–] danisth@hexbear.net 11 points 3 days ago

Yes agreed. But it does give you tools that let you control how results are presented, which can help to create a good experience and remove AI results.