Ecosia.org ⬆️
this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
116 points (96.0% liked)
Technology
84816 readers
3759 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I haven't used Google search since 2008, when I starting using Linux and Duckduckgo was the default search engine for Firefox.
Oh, how Firefox changed...
Firefox always used Google as their default search engine, since Google pays a lot of money for that privilege.
Edit: some Linux distros used to change that default while they were shipping a non-branded fork of Firefox.
Google search as I know it shit the bed over a decade ago.
Yeah, it's so tiring. Search for something, entire first page is useless aggregator sites, containing nothing about the actual topic other than keywords. Waste of time
Agreed, and for the moment the "AI experience" is better than what Google Search was a couple of years ago... but I have faith, they'll sell this one out too, after all: users are the product.
Google Search has long since diminished from it's peak. 15 years ago we used to play a "game" by describing something as vaguely or strangely as possible and would be entertained to find it still on the first page of search results.
SEO and paid ranking caused a steady decline in Google search performance, and LLMs are the kill shot.
Indexing and ranking were already a solved problem, and conventional algorithms accomplished it much better than LLMs do. Unfortunately, LLMs need to find uses to justify investment, so now they must be used for any task that they can be used for, even if its worse than the solutions that we already had.
even if its worse than the solutions that we already had.
Like Gemini replacing Assistant. Holy shit, what a dumpster fire.
The other factor is companies, interests, paying the Google and their ilk to not include things in search results. And only include what they choose as an alternative.
Then you might have different interests gaming the search results to bury something they don't like.
This is only amplified by LLMs
At the moment, I do find that the LLMs bring me more of what I want to see than the basic search engine used to a few years back... 15-20 years ago the basic search engine seemed to be much better then slowly deteriorated from there.
I have confidence, they'll sell this version to the highest bidder faster than they did the last one, then it will be just as bad as listening to radio advertisements as a way to find a good local restaurant to eat at...
SearXNG. I will never understand why it doesn’t get used more. It is so easy to set up.
I degoogled as a Covid project. Mostly it just made me feel a little bit better... and then GenAI hit. Hopefully I'll go my whole life without ever having used Gemini. And hopefully, if they ingested any of my pre-pandemic emails, photos, docs, etc to train with, pulling it out of cold storage will at least have cost them extra time and money.
I wouldn’t know because I mainly use DuckDuckGo and haven’t had a reason to use Google in a long time.
DuckDuckGo is just Microslop Bing with a different front-end.
Yeah, whatever bias and censorship Micro$lop’s search index has, except supposedly without the tracking. It’s a step up from Google and Bing, but not the perfect solution.
What do you recommend?
If you live in Europe, the French search engine Qwant is great.
I recommend DDG as the first line, and kagi free tier if you can't find it on DDG.
I, as of yet, haven't really explored any alternatives, but I see a lot of others mentioned in the comments here.
Ugh, damn post title. I went through the whole article looking for the alternatives before realizing the title of the article says nothing about alternatives.
Sorry, it was in the post body. Will update post to make this clearer.
Kagi and Startpage are my go-to search engines these days.
I have a paid Kagi account and feel it is very much worth the investment.
I do not like the vibes of Startpage's owner, System1.
If you're using Startpage because it uses google on the back-end, Ecosia does much the same nowadays (you can toggle between that and bing).
Too much AI with Kagi.
What makes it worth it to you over something like Ecosia?
Also, I’m on the fence about startpage. They were Dutch but were bought by an American advertising company.
I've used both Ecosia and Kagi and find the former gives me too many irrelevant results compared to Kagi. Recently though Kagi has been giving me some funky results but it doesn't happen very often.
Qwant is French and they've been partnering with Ecosia to build a European index.
If I wanted a conversation I wouldn't be using a search engine to get answers.
Big business is the enemy.
Capitalism sucks:
- Private property fetishism (erodes the commons)
- Free market fundamentalism (prioritizes the freedoms of the biggest asset holders over the rest)
- Accumulationism (incentivizes hoarding far beyond where most people would have liked to stop hoarding if the system didn't demand it)
- Consolidationism leading into economic royalism (mergers leading to monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, a two-tiered "justice" system, rules for thee but not for me)
- Transactionalism (no sense of society or priciples, but instead a system of backscratching where things only get done for their exchange value and for no other reason)
Eu-first index, you say? I might wanna check that out!
I use Vivaldi with Startpage instead of Chrome, etc; because I hate getting the AI results that are wrong half the time because they pull off of what some idiot on Reddit said (or just hallucinate)