It seems like AI is "helpfully" showing up in more and more search engines. With Google's recent addition and its less-than-reliable results, I thought it might be time to mention an alternative.
We all know how frequently AI just hallucinates answers, makes stuff up, and gets things wrong. Why would we want to trust our searches - where we're usually trying to find factual information - to something that could be this wrong?
Some folks are going to no doubt be chiming in with 'Use DuckDuckGo' at this point, and that's all well and good except that one of the sources DDG uses is Bing, and that's increasingly unreliable as more and more AI articles are written and more and more AI tools are added. It's better than the alternatives, don't get me wrong, but it's still not exactly what I am personally looking for.
Which is where my recommendation comes in.
STRACT is a search engine that doesn't give a single fig about your site rankings. It doesn't care about algorithms or SEO, it only cares about what you searched and how you searched it.
Are you a programmer wanting to get results exclusively from places like Stack Exchange? Previously, we'd have to scroll past a bunch of junk on Google or Bing, but with Stract, you can simply customize your search with an Optic and... boom. Results are limited to only what you care about.
If we look for something like... I don't know. SSRS, for example, and set our Optic to only Discussions, we get a bunch of forum results related to SSRS.
It's not perfect, of course. It is a search engine run by a single guy out of his house, done primarily as his end of year project... but if you remember (and liked) what Search Engines used to be like back in the early 00's before everything was put behind algorithms and SEO rankings... this might be something you find super useful.
Personally, I was sold as soon as I read their About page:
Our Values
Complete transparency -- You can view our code and follow the development directly on Github
Privacy focussed -- We will never track you. Period. And you can always verify this in our source code.
Immensely customizable -- We aim to give you the ability to customize everything about the search. You can block sites, boost sites, prioritize links from specific sites and much, much more.
Oh, and if we ever become evil (maybe by changing our motto) please take our code and start a competitor. The fact that you have this ability will make sure that our values will always be aligned with our users.
Public repo for the code, privacy-focused, and search results that don't try to say "you don't really want to search for the text you searched for, you want this instead"? Well, that's a big winner in my books.
Check it out, play around with it, and see if just maybe it's something you'll switch to too.