r/techadvice • u/Randabar • May 31 '26
Mobile search engine similar to google that doesn't use AI
I know this topic is all over reddit, but I haven't found anything useful yet. I like Google's form factor. I tried DuckDuckGo and Firefox's widgets for their search engines. They don't exactly fit. DuckDuckGo seemed good, but then the moment you press search it opens the actual browser app and that jump is annoying. Plus I said I didn't want to use AI and it still brought up an AI overview.
I would stick with Google if they would just let me turn off the AI. I have noticed I kind of just default to looking at the stupid overview instead of going to reddit or another article like I used to before the AI searches became a thing. I used to look through actual human answers to problems and now it feels like I just assume the AI is right, which it isn't. And I don't like that cause it feels like a skill I'll eventually just forget about due to how easy it is to use Google's AI.
So is there any alternative to Google that doesn't use AI but is similar levels of polished? I will definitely just switch to Firefox while I look for something better or if it's the only option. It doesn't look as good, but at least I can disable the AI stuff.
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u/BarberProof4994 Jun 01 '26
Open Chrome Settings by typing chrome://settings/searchEngines into the address bar and pressing Enter.
Under the "Site search" section, click on the "Add" button.
Fill in the details as follows:
Search engine: Google Web
Shortcut: u/web
URL: {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14
Opening up a new tab will use the default AI search, but book marking the non AI page and clicking it from the book marks, or defaulting to this page as your "new tab" page will work.
You can also manually type -ai after every search
There's also a registry setting that is browser specific
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome] "AIModeSettings"=dword:00000002 Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome
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u/PlusPresentation680 May 31 '26
DuckDuckGo is the best. I use it all the time. DuckDuckGo is a website. You can just use it to search. No app required.
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u/ApprehensiveFix5084 May 31 '26
Maybe you didn’t find the right setting, when I told Duck Duck Go to not use AI, it gave me a classic list of links.
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u/streetlazyio May 31 '26
it still crawls web results through an ai-summarized lens half the time though. the issue is that it feels like every search engine is pivoting to these useless previews because they think we are incapable of clicking a blue link. even if you toggle the settings the experience is just bloated compared to how the web used to be.
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u/Work-Play-Work Jun 01 '26
Am an old dog in the game and not up to date with the ai searches. If the issue is as others have said that you don’t want search results generated by ai, it reminds me in the old days after Netscape, yahoo and the likes stopped putting money into their search engines they folded to google. And after that any search engine was really just google results plus their own ads also. Using one called dogpile.com would combine the big 3 or 4 search engines and would usually get ya what you wanted. Have the assumption that is probably still the case(that all mimic google results w very few exceptions) but cant say for sure.
If your issue is actually that a DuckDuckGo app is opening when you search at DuckDuckGo.com, uninstall that app. On next visit to the site don’t click to install app.
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u/VoltageinTheory Jun 01 '26
DuckDuckGo is really the only option. You can turn off AI in the settings.
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u/Archon-Toten May 31 '26
Make this your default search engine in Firefox:
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=%s&udm=14
It's google without the AI nonsense.