The long-standing issue with searching has been always the endless advertisments, websites that regurgitate what others have written and this problem has only been exacerbated by the introduction of the LLM Slop generators.

There are a few paths that can help you with your search duties. I personally opted into the paid solution of kagi, but I understand if it is not affordable for some¹, and I will provide the solution that is completely free and has at least some of the advantages.

kagi is a paid search engine. As you may say, why would I pay for a search engine? The thing is, operating a search engine costs money. And it is a never-ending job, you can’t just index all the sites once. The content changes.

What differentiates kagi is their customizability. It offers a way to disable slop websites right from it’s interface. There is a free solution as I will mention later, but there are other advantages.

kagi has different modes for indexing, one of the built-in ones is “Academic” which restricts results only to academic publications! No more google scholar, you can search relevant results right from your search engine, finally. As a person who does occasionally some research this is greatly appreciated.

Other big advantage is kagi’s ability to rank or derank websites. Do you want to push wikipedia higher? Yes you can. Just click the shield icon. This feature is especially useful when there are two websites offering almost the same content (looking at you, nixos.wiki and wiki.nixos.org).

One use of LLMs that is greatly appreciated is the context aware translation. kagi has gone one step further and the translate feature can also give you grammar, declinations and other explanations of the feature which aids greatly with language learning.

Not to be on a high note too long, kagi has some not-so-great things about it. Firstly, it’s very “AI” enabled by default. You can disable it, but it definitely supports “AI” as something that should exist in the future. Secondly, it is a VC funded Sillicon Valley company, which makes me fear for it’s future. For me the negatives do not outweigh the benefits, but I will let you be your own judge.

kagi also offers LLM tools which I don’t particularly enjoy, but you are very much free not to use them as I don’t.

I will briefly provide a list of other search engines and what was my experience with them. Most of them are serviceable, but I had issues with all of them, in one way or the other.

• searx – unmaintained, you should prefer searxng
• searxng – it’s a “meta”-search engine, which means that it only aggregates anonymized results from other search engines. There is no central service and you need to either pick an instance, or host it yourself. It can be very hit or miss. Sometimes the server can be temporarily banned and you need to use a different provider. If you pick a good instance it can be definitely usable.
• duckduckgo – a us based search engine based on bing. definitely usable, but I had my fair share of it missing results. Also I’m not so sure on how much data they actually collect.
• startpage – europe based search engine, based on anonymized google results with supposedly “anonimized” ads. I have had some issues using it from public wifis, as the service banned the IP for abuse.
• google – hell no.
• bing – why.

You know the feeling, you search for your very specific query just to click on a website that is somehow not saying anything useful, and after a little bit of reading you realize you have been reading thrice sloppified junk from the official docs. Say no more. With uBlacklist and Huge AI Blocklist you can finally rest easy knowing that your results are thrice sloppified junk that was made by humans.

There are many different browsers available for some platforms, but I have not tested them. If browser here exists on your platform, probably it’s a good choice (if it’s not Firefox on iOS). I would stay clear from any Chromium based browser, due to firstly due to Google, it’s monopoly over browsers and their spyware, secondly, because Manifest V3, that prevents adblockers from blocking ads.

• Firefox – I hope I don’t need to convince you why using anything made by google is bad. Firefox has made some questionable choices, but it still remains as the most competetive alternative to Blink (chromium renderer) based browsers.
• Icefox – a libre firefox soft-fork. For some reason Icefox is dead set on setting libreJS as the default, making most of the web unusable. Otherwise I welcome the choice of a fully libre browser.
• LibreWolf – a fork of firefox with private defaults, if you don’t need Firefox Sync it’s a perfectly good alternative to Firefox.
• Zen – a reimagined browser, the UI is really pretty. My only issue is that it is much more memory hungry than Firefox, and since I’m employed as a web developer, I struggle with 32GB of RAM constantly. I had to switch back to plain Firefox.
• Gnome Web – Webkit-based browser, can definitely work for some people, the UI is well integrated into Gnome and I find it very nice, however it struggles with a lot of website (due to the nature of Webkit) and is noticeably slower than Firefox.

• Firefox Focus – if you are a chronic tab hoarder, a browser with just one window is the thing you will love. A search and forget browser I use for quickly lookup stuff.
• Orion – built on Safari, from people behind kagi, but one of the few browsers that has extension support, so you can install uBlock Origin and others
• Firefox iOS – essentially just Safari with firefox sync, sadly nowhere near Firefox for Android

• uBlock Origin – a must, best adblock that exists
• uBlacklist – already mentioned before, an extension to block LLM slop from search results in any search engine
• Consent-O-Matic – autofill cookie banners based on your global preference, a life saver in this day and age

This article is in no way comprehensive, I only touched on technologies I have personal experience with. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to shoot me a message.

¹ Although if you get a family plan of kagi for 6 people it can be as $3 per person per month (+ tax)

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