Kagi is the only search engine I use which has really good results and no junk links. ...and you have to pay for it, of course. It's a meta search engine but they use their own indexes for news results and Teclis, which indexes small commercial sites with fewer than 5 trackers. One of the cool features it added recently was an icon for identifying paywalled articles.
I'd like to recommend Mojeek, my default search engine, but it still has a way to go. If you're just looking for an "answer engine" rather than a general search engine...I guess an LLM probably isn't a bad place to start?
Thanks for mentioning us nonetheless! You can help out with that journey, if you want, by chucking some searches (either new ones or old ones you remember being not so great) into the Evaluation Page and voting.
It's good to see you guys on Lemmy :)
I tested it a bit a few days ago, but I'll see if I can give it a more rigorous go today. The ones I've found Mojeek to be weak in are bug strings that programs I'm working with spit out. Although I think I've had more luck in the past few months.
Love the sentiment, and I agree, but anti consumer surveillance tech is here to stay, sadly. Can't tell you how many people in my life have Alexa, FireTV and random shit like that.
This doesn't mean that you have to surrender to it.
Little baby steps, at least we can make the difference for ourselves... But Google is in my walls
Why don't you take google out of your walls?
It's threatening me with breaking my house's structural integrity
Oh yeah, load-bearing Googles are a trap
I was thinking the same until @Rikj000 responded to my comment. The defeat of the surveillance state (both private and government) relies on us.
Thanks for the tip. Dodged another proprietary bullet.