If I may suggest something crazy: Try Bing for a month. You can turn off most of the crap.
Backstory: I've been a Google user since it was in beta, having moved from AltaVista. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to try something different in an ongoing effort to reduce my Google footprint. Kagi is the obvious alternative, but they don't have the right plan for me — if their no-AI plan offered unlimited searches, I'd be using it. As an experiment, I set Bing as my default search engine, and it's been fine. You can turn off the front page "tabloid" crap, and also Copilot responses on result pages.
High five! Same here! Not many people seem to know what AltaVista is or was. I do use Bing in one browser on my work computer, its okay, still find it much easier to just ask Grok for links to things... I get summaries and exactly what I was looking for.
Yes! That's an important point — I'm also using LLMs for search quite a bit, and in fact that really got the ball rolling in terms of reducing my dependence on Google Search specifically.
Backstory: I've been a Google user since it was in beta, having moved from AltaVista. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to try something different in an ongoing effort to reduce my Google footprint. Kagi is the obvious alternative, but they don't have the right plan for me — if their no-AI plan offered unlimited searches, I'd be using it. As an experiment, I set Bing as my default search engine, and it's been fine. You can turn off the front page "tabloid" crap, and also Copilot responses on result pages.