Here’s Uruky’s recent thread for reference (- and note that as with PriEco and Hister, I have no personal experience with it):
Including its previous thread: Uruky search engine (paid service)
Same thing happened to my previous reply here mentioning PriEco. Which in my opinion was approached from an informational perspective regarding the functioning of independent search engines vs any “real self promotion” on behalf of PriEco.
I find no search engine works well for everything so I just add multiple search engines to my browser so I can quickly and easily use whichever search engine I’d like by using shortcuts. If your browser doesn’t support that functionality you can use DuckDuckGo bangs or Brave bangs instead. Usually DuckDuckGo works fine but sometimes I’ll need to check Brave Search or Google instead.
This seems like an interesting option to me but I don’t know how I’d do it or which search engines would be best for what purposes. Or what “bangs” are.
I currently use Firefox with all the AI features turned off.
(I am really, really bad at remembering keyboard shortcuts. I literally have dozens of the most common ones printed out and taped to my laptop next to the built in trackpad.)
Bangs are like “!w” to search wikipedia directly from a search engine that supports bangs (like duckduckgo and brave). Here a “bang” just means the exclamation point, !
See also: DuckDuckGo !Bangs
The new AI assisted search function requires as much information about the user to be more helpful. The information gathering could be from existing user profile, plus continued conversation through search process (described in article).
I think AI is here to stay, and can provide great value to our day to day live. Just the question of how to use it, who has the control of user data. I think users should have the control of their own data, to determine who and when the data can be used, for what purpose. And after the use, the data should NOT be retained by third-party, potentially/could be used for other purposes, such as (relatively inconsequential) serving ads, or selling your data to data brokers (search term: “Data Monetization”).
There are several initiatives to solve this problem, to give control back to data owners. When AI is used to provide better assistance, that should be under the supervision of owners.
P.S.: if you use Google search, you can delete your activities: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity
I learned from Reddit - r/technology that you can just add that to your browsers as a search engine.
- Mullvad has this built-in (Search Engine: DuckDuckGo (No AI))
- For Brave you have to manually add it
go tobrave://settings/searchEngines>Site search>Add(button) >
Name: DuckDuckGo (No AI) <— can be whatever you want
Shortcut: (make up anything here)
URL with %s in place of query: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s
then set that as default in brave
For librewolf:
about:preferences#search > Search Shortcuts > Add (button) >
Search engine name: DuckDuckGo (No AI) <— can be whatever you want
URL with %s in place of search term: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s
keyword (optional): (put something here if you would like)
then change default to the one you just made.
Edit: forgot to add to change default in librewolf steps.
In that case, it might be easiest to stick to either DuckDuckGo Bangs or Brave Search Bangs depending on whether you prefer DuckDuckGo or Brave Search.
It adds an extra website for you to load as the query must first go through DuckDuckGo/Brave so if you’d rather add search engines directly to Firefox you can follow this guide:
Most search engines follow the standard URL format mentioned in the guide, but if that doesn’t work you can try adding a search engine using Mycroft.
On that note, Kagi and Uruky also support custom bangs and a MIT-licensed list: GitHub - kagisearch/bangs: Repository of bangs used by Kagi Search · GitHub
Ecosia also supports a few bangs: Search shortcuts - Ecosia Help Center
On that note,
There was a nice idea by YouTuber name Theo. There is a way for a web search engine to make it so that during a Bang, you don’t actually have to load the search engine website which then redirects you, but you get redirected directly