May I suggest DuckDuckGo? They let you turn off the AI summary.

They even have a direct URL for it if you don't want to change the setting: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

join the elite: kagi.com

A search engine you have to sign up for?

Edit: its a paid for service hence the login required. Looks like its starts at $5/mo for 300 searches per month. How many search do you all average per month?

All jokes aside, I usually do want to read the six Wikipedia pages because getting a one-sentence answer with no context is risky and not all that useful anyway. I need the nuance and background info for any question worth asking.

Hey, free socks. Actually, I think that promo is over.

You may either read all of them up front, or read all of them when verifying the validity of the ai summary. Your choice.

once you know, you can never go back

And pay, i'd not mind a sign up but i'd rather not pay, especially if i cannot even have the option to self host

Join the elite: create an account and pay $120/year to a private American company for search results.

6? That's rookie numbers man, you gotta pump those numbers up.

It's like getting the info from some rando at some party. It's to be lightly penciled in.

Yep. I still have yet to see an actual use for AI. People are like “but summaries!” Summarize this: summaries are only useful if the information being summarized doesn’t matter, which to me means you could just skip the entire thing.

This isn’t a high school test, this is real life. Why are you trying to use SparkNotes?

Don’t worry, they’re also super AI-pilled and known for randomly cancelling projects. But I’m sure the search is great or whatever

for any question worth asking

Do you really mean questions about things people might not know that yet have simple answers that don't need pages of context, are not worth asking?

They are great to tell you the words you need to search for something; they are great for analyzing "vibes" out of texts; they are reasonably good to generate you a link to some site that answers a hard to find question, traditional search would be better if there were any one around that isn't completely broken.

The Wikipedia marathon doesn't stop til you get to Hitler.

…and then have an AI summarize those six Wikipedia articles because you can't find the answer you're looking for in them.

As someone with ADHD, I disagree. Sometimes the information is important, and I don't want to have to dig through a wall of text to find it. One thing that annoys me about normies when they write, is that they tend to blab on forever on things that don't matter instead of getting straight to the point.

If people wouldn't use so many unnecessary words, I wouldn't need a god damn LLM to summarize their ramblings into something my brain can actually parse.

I would say that even simple answers at least deserve a source or citation. This is my biggest complaint with AI search, you get an "answer" with no qualification. The citations listed in the AI summary often don't contain the actual info being presented.

This question certainly wasn't worth asking.

noai.duckduckgo.com

THIS! I recall somebody doing contract review and having AI summarize the contracts just to see how well they did... The AI left out some really important stuff and also occasionally hallucinated stuff that wasn't there. Summarizing a contract should be pretty black-n-white -- if AI can't handle that properly, I'm not going to trust its summary of something more complex.

My go to. I used to use Google for harder to search stuff, but these days Google isnt worth the try anymore.

If you use Google just type -AI after your search and it removes the AI.

Yesterday there was a weird play in the Thursday Night Football game where the Bears' quarterback handed the ball to an offensive lineman, who ran it in for a touchdown. The referees threw a flag and called the play back because it was an "illegal handoff", which I had never seen before.

I was texting my brother during the game and we both commented on how weird it was. My brother googled it and read the AI summary, which said the play was legal - citing a reddit thread from several years ago. He was like "Google says the play was legal - the refs got it wrong!"

I had to go to the NFL rulebook and dig through a bunch of sections before confirming that the refs were correct and you can't do that.

AI is absolute dogshit for anything that requires a bit of nuance. But it is really fast at serving up that dogshit, so a lot of lazy people would rather just accept a quick wrong answer than a slow correct one.

Okay so how much glue to keep the cheese on my pizza?

That's still full of AI, the filter quality you can see for yourself without an account for a limited amount of searches. If I search an image and the URLs on slop I see in the results with the slop filter enabled that literally contains keywords related to AI slop and KAGI doesn't filter them out...well, I draw conclusions.

But check out this awesome ai recommendation I got when searching for Halloween 2026... (Fuck everything about this btw, no sarcasm)

AI overview uses around 20 times more energy than regular searches.

It's absolutely batshit crazy that most search engine put it on by default just for it to summarize a wiki page 90% of the time.
It's like we're collectively pushing for a mass extinction.

It's not just wrong. It's plausibly wrong, which is worse. It's the difference between giving someone a recipe for cookies where you fuck up the ratio of flour and sugar vs giving someone a recipe for cooking where you've jokingly put "50 pounds of gunpowder" in there as an ingredient. People know the obvious wrong thing is wrong. But they'll bake the fucked up ratio cookies and then just not know what went wrong.

The funniest part is I've gotten better answers from duckeuckgo and Bing's AI back in the day because they both didn't treat reddit as a reputable source of info lmao.

Dunno how the scene is now, but I wouldn't be surprised if its the same.

Fucking hell, lol

What's even crazier is for a lot of things we already had a quick result overview. Like if you wanted the definition of a word. For a long time it was the case that you could just "define socks" and you'd get a widget at the top with the definition. Why would you replace that with AI, and have an AI process that request every single time someone wants to define socks instead of just keeping the old widget!?

I hate it when i need to google programming stuff because Google Gemini LOVES to make stuff up and takes up half a page trying to answer

I refuse to use AI but my boss only uses it. He has not found a correct answer to a query for 6 months.

I know the rankings change like every month, but isn't Gemini one of the "dumber" ones? I've only tried it a few times and got annoyed, but it's been a while.

Indeed.

I'm pretty sure a good percentage of the searches are also just people typing the name of the website they want to access in the search bar. They don't want any information, just a link. All these searches now consume a massive amout of energy for basically nothing.

"Innovation" lol

stop googling, start ducking.

Lmao, I guess my internal ad filter is still working because I had to look at that twice to notice it and wondered if there was a new Halloween movie coming out this year or something. Agreed, fuck that shit.

4 seems like a good amount.

I tried them and looked into them. They do something, but nothing like the curated searches they try to sell you on.

Ooo, they're cramming in the ads now eh?

This is the way

That's right. I didn't put the question in the search bar for you to tell me the answer. That question was the first shoveling of dirt in a 6 hour rabbit hole that I was fixing to explore.

This grew from ‘I don’t want Wikipedia, I’ll pay $150 a month to Encyclopaedia Brittannica for a set of 60 books the way God intended…’

There's a site for that..let me remember the name.. Wikipedia! There it is.

It's certainly no leader for software engineering tasks.

is "ducking" an actual term now? Come to think of it, ducking doesn't sound any sillier than googling

Better yet:

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

and you can add it as a custom search for firefox/waterfox as:

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s