ddg subdomain without the ai and with ai images filtered by default
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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Use google's verbatim mode. intitle: “index of” is also like a cheat code. In verbatim mode it gets you only documents from publicly available databases and sometimes finds you cool stuff people maybe didn't want to share publicly
example
intitle: “index of” /pdf “media literacy”
People are suggesting you PAY for a search engine. It's been over.
Hey I skim on the free trial for kagi using disposable emails ;-;
The "World of Warcraft free player" grindset, eh?
I do not disdain people on account of their kagi recs, I simply point to it as an indicator of the dire straits of search engines, and shit.
I thought they were pulling my leg, but someone recently recommended Dogpile to me and, apparently it's 1996 again, because it's the best search engine I've used in years. No AI spam, no SEO spam. Just slightly bad search results.
Dogpile
What strange twitter. A few posts from 2026 that make no sense, and before that last post was 2015.
Looking at their explanations, they seem like a meta search provider. So if their upstream sucks, how cna they be any good?
Dogpile is a search engine from 1996 whose gimmick was that they'd aggregate all the other search engines and get more results. They were the best briefly, before Google showed up and was so much better than all the other search engines that you'd never want to mix it with something else.
I have no clue why Dogpile is good right now. Some strange accident?
I've also tried it, inspired by you, and wow wtf! This is amazingly good, on par if not better than Kagi lmao
Search is dead for the foreseeable future. The “alternative” engines almost entirely use the Google or bing indexes and just give a layer of privacy (that is likely broken by Google having some secret fingerprinting technique)
Some, like DuckDuckGo, ecosia, and kagi, append the index with their own but still ultimately rely on Google and bing indexes to a significant degree. Though some of these are moving towards entirely independent indices (may take years)
Alternatively you can look at other countries indices, which are independent: baidu (China), yandex (Russia), mojeek (uk)
But ultimately web search is dead. Advertising and commercialization killed it. Advertising ruins everything, anyone who works in marketing should be put on a rocket and shot into the sun
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There haven't been any good search services for at least a decade. SwissCows is one of the better ones but requires js and filters anything they think is inappropriate. Searx, when it works. Gigablast, before it shut down. I've mostly given up on it.
boolean stuff don't even work anymore, you used to get a direct quote when you used "" so search something
It does still work on google, but you have to go all the way to verbatum mode. Super annoying.
Yeah what's that about? How can that function just cease to work? And we're okay with it?
-[excludethisterm] means "humiliate me by continuing to surface results with just this term"
"Ya know what? Now I'm going to give you results with that term even more!"
Internet searching was going down the tube well before AI because of SEO slop but now AI has accelerated that tremendously.
The AI search assistant could be used to help mitigate the slop but you're basically just having the AI sift through the bullshit for you and hope it doesn't hallucinate some bullshit for you.
My conspiracy theory is that they enshittified search to make AI look better.
How is this a conspiracy theory? Google literally made search worse to boost ad revenue. Why wouldnt engines do the same for their "gonna replace everyone and everything" llm?
It's a conspiracy theory in the sense Operation Condor is; well documented fact openly admitted to by the culprits but if you tell this to a normal person they will think that you're insane.
Normal people are strange and disconnected from reality 
Definitely, my conspiracy is the same because a comrade on YouTube explained "It was better at being a search engine because google was so bad, it is still worse than old google but better than current one"
I know it's been long coming, but this has been something I've noticed in the past few months. It's impossible to find ANY human-written sources, stuff that had at least 30 seconds of a person's time. I'll struggle through 10, 20 even 30 pages before giving up. I'd love to know if there's any way to exclude that stuff.
My tip is to limit date range to the end of 2022 and hope nothing important in the field has happened since.
Pretty much. Even noai.duckduckgo is 99% AI slop.
it doesn't remove ai results, it moreso disables ddg ai features like the chat bot or whatever.
The problem is that the noai doesn't make the search results of duckduckgo any better.
They were good when DDG was still based on Yandex
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Idk if it's just me but I generally still find what I'm looking for easily enough? You have to scroll past the paragraph of AI slop now but it's still not too hard to find stuff generally. The HTML university websites will still come up if you're looking for academic stuff that doesn't exist elsewhere.
Of course there is stuff that you can't search, but it isn't really Google's fault that my private trackers don't show up on their site
startpage.com Still some SEO shit, but it's easier to sort through, kinda like Google used to be.
i have had to resort to asking real people questions that are even slightly complicated.
And then they just go prompt the AI anyway. NO DUDE YOU'RE A DOCTOR, I'M ASKING YOU
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