Exploring alternatives to Google search

1

Read David Sparks article about Kagi search. I’m Still Digging Kagi - MacSparky

I have been using Perplexity as an alternative to Google search. I read about claims that Perplexity has been web crawling sites without permission, but have enjoyed the experience and results.

My goals are:

  1. Avoid ad driven search with accurate results.
  2. Ability to take advantage of AI to some extent to enhance search results, realizing we are in beginning innings of AI.
  3. Privacy of search topics
  4. Free or low cost-though I wonder if possible if not ad driven
  5. Speed of results
  6. Ability to use with VPN service to enhance privacy.
    Thoughts?

Thanks for your input.
GM

2

Raycast has an extension for this as well.

3

I’ve been using Kagi since it launched and no longer use any other search engine.
Well worth it.

4

SearXNG does not fulfill all your requirements, but might still be worth looking into:

https://docs.searxng.org

(I’m currently running a self-hosted instance instead of DuckDuckGo)

Here’s a list of instances that you can try:

5

I mainly use Duck Duck Go. Love the bangs! And I occasionaly use Google search when necessary. I experimented a bit with Perplexity, and found it useful overall, but their lack of ethics turned me off. Kagi sounds interesting. But someone pointed out in another thread that its not great for local searches.

6

Of your requirements:

DuckDuckGo meets those. In my experience AI generated results need to be double check for accuracy that it isn’t worth using; basically the LLM behind it contains much junk and I’m guessing that the other AI systems are equally contain utter garbage. Never forget Microsoft’s chatbot

DuckDuckGo does not put up ads neither does it feed the ad monsters with cookies.

They also have an iOS/IPadOS app with the nice feature that when a web site is closed all the cookies are burned to cinder.

In my browsers (in reality that’s heavily locked down Firefox) DDG is the only search engine available.