This is a very low-information announcement here but if this is taken to the extreme, it means that DuckDuckGo, Qwant, and many other so-called “alternative” search engines are going to either have to look for a new provider of results, or die.
Thurott’s article on this implies that “big customers like DDG will be unaffected”. Though he also says information is scarce.
Swisscows ? Mojeek ?
Wonder what their reason for this is.
Something something AI
Something something money.
AI is just the latest hype train they’re hopping in the hopes of making more money.
Unpopular opinion: Bing is better than Google in recommending Edge browser
I use Opera on a Mac for all my Bing-based Edge-recommending needs.
Edge: when getting molested by sundar the creep ain’t enough
Shiiit, I really don’t want to go back to Google and all their sponsored/AI/tracking bullshit. Any other privacy-focused search engines out there that don’t rely on this?
Try using Startpage.
That anonymizes Google results. It’s Google, all the way down.
Kagi
American company though. Not supporting that
Yeah I’m far too used to getting my search for free to pay for it. I’ll fuckin’ use chatgpt before I pay a subscription fee for that shit, even if it is a substantially better option.
Answers still Kagi. You get use of the basic tiers for all the big ai services.
You ever wanted to blacklist Quora from search results? You can do that too.
Look at you having standards.
That’s what I said before I used it, you can try it free for 30 days
This is why tech communities suck.
Too many shills and useful idiots trying to viral market bullshit.
I looked at it briefly, the only free option I saw was 100 free searches, which will not last your average user anywhere near 30 days. Shit that might not last me 3 days depending on what I’m doing.
I think you overestimate the average user
You think Microsoft gives you privacy?
They make billions on targeted ad revenue.
No, I use duckduckgo which is powered by Bing’s API. Hence why I said other privacy-focused search engine.
Shiiit, I really don’t want to go back to Google and all their sponsored/AI/tracking bullshit.
I can tell you with confidence that I simply just won’t.
What’s the alternative? I guess you can use chatgpt or whatever as a sort of search engine? shrug
people who use LLMs as search engine make me go 😨
my colleagues are doing it too, and I just want to yell at them that LLMs have no idea about reality, they will confidently tell you to eat glue
If you tell the o3 reasoning model to just search the web and give you the top results instead of answering your query it can actually be really useful for obscure queries. I was able to find specific spec sheets for my model of monitor when a google search would only produce the specs for basically any other model the manufacturer made. Even with the model number in quotes
At the end of the day, it’s still an agent searching the web like a person, and its results are only good if search is decent.
searx, because it queries multiple engines that are accessible, and perhaps google frontends (whoogle, libre y, and that new mullvad thing).
but for the past years I was exclusively using duckduckgo and it would be very said if it would go away :( I started recommending it to others too
Mullvad Leta is at least google minus the tracking.
Brave Search has its own index
Is that something built into the browser? i dropped Brave when I heard Google was forcing the adblock-gimping shit in Manifest V3 into Chomium. Also I was never entirely keen on their crypto-hawking bullshit.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates?id=492574
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing
So all tiers are getting discontinued… Unless there is an unlisted custom tier? It’s hard to imagine duckducgo only processing 250 requests per second. But then maybe that is enough and didn’t they make their own index anyways? Maybe that was to ease the load
Oh and they suggest using ai instead
DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Qwant, Ecosia… the last two have been working together to make their own index, hopefully it’s going to be usable by then.
I hope so, I don’t trust MAGA owned Brave.
Bing? People use Bing?
If you use DuckDuckGo, you’re essentially using Bing.
I did not know this. I find duckduckgo to be more useful than Google most times now. It’s crazy how bad Google has become.
Qwant is also good. And it’s building their own index together with Ecosia.
qwant is region locked
You don’t? It is by far the best search engine for porn in existence, especially Bing Video.
This is true. Omg. I forgot! I haven’t searched for porn in so long! I just to live shows now.
(some) alternative search engines use Bing because building an index is hard and the only project I know of doing this work from base is Mojeek: https://www.mojeek.com/
brave search, ecosia and qwant are all in various stages of having their own index
Brave bought their index. The other two did a PR announcement that they are gonna build one, you seen much else? Point very much still stands.
