What are you talking about? I just tried two test queries on DDG, and neither one had LLM-generated nonsense, and the one that was in double-quotes returned only five results, all of which had the double-quoted phrase and one of which was the thing I was challenging it to find.

Can you give an example of a query where DDG returns LLM results or doesn't respect your double-quotes?

https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist is supposed to remove AI slop from the results of various search engines. Wants the uBlacklist browser addon though.

Posted this previously:

yes. use any of the following, in no particular order:

• ecosia.org - A non-profit certified B corp that plants trees by serving ads in your search results. Bing search underneath.
• duckduckgo.com - A privacy friendly search engine. Primarily sourced from Bing but mixes in a few other sources.
• any SearXNG instance - A self-hostable search front-end to various search engines.
• marginalia.nu - specifically 'random' - An independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.

I use Qwant sometimes but it's sourced from Bing. Searx is better if you can self-host. Kagi is better if you can afford to pay (but you asked for free).

Brave Search is pretty nice

I use whoogle

Not sure if its untrustworthly or not, but switched over to Startpage and been liking the results. Just wished it would implement the !bang system from ddg

www.startpage.com

Kagi if you are willing to pay for the service. I think that's reasonable but your needs may vary.

Startpage.com works well enough

udm14.org is about as close as you can get

I've been using brave search on my pc and phone for maybe 6 months now. i still use google like 10% of the time if i'm searching for something that isn't in english, but otherwise, id even say for many things brave returns better results than google

startpage

shitty LLM-generated nonsense sites

It's kind of impossible to filter these out computationally, regardless of brand. You pretty much need to run them through a bigger LLM than generated them, and the economics of doing that for every indexed site are obviously bad. Doing it by hand may or may not be workable either, depending on how quickly you can detect bad domains versus how quickly a new domain can be put up.

It's on us to figure out who's trustworthy, and who just sounds authoritative, unfortunately.