A.I. Start-Up Perplexity Offers to Buy Google’s Chrome Browser for $34.5 Billion - The tiny start-up hopes to take advantage of an upcoming antitrust ruling against the tec... - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/technology/perplexity-google-chrome-bid.html #mergersacquisitionsanddivestitures #antitrustlawsandcompetitionissues #computersandtheinternet #artificialintelligence #justicedepartment #perplexityaiinc #srinivasaravind #searchengines #pichaisundar #webbrowsers #mehtaamitp

Kagi

Privaсy focused search engine that aggregates results from different sources. Has many advanced search filters and many search types, including map search.

100 free searchers.

https://kagi.com/

"When Google unveiled AI Overviews last year, online publishers worried that the AI-generated blurbs in the top spot of search results would spark precipitous declines in traffic and gut the business model of vast reaches of the web.

Now, there is growing evidence validating those fears.

New research shows the web traffic that publishers have long relied on is significantly slowing, thanks to AI-generated summaries and the rise of AI chatbots.

Traffic to CNN's website has dropped about 30% from a year ago. Business Insider's and HuffPost's sites saw traffic plunges around 40% in the same period, according to figures from digital market data firm Similarweb.

While many factors influence traffic fluctuations, publishers say the introduction of Google's AI Overviews in May 2024 has packed a punch.

Helen Havlak, the publisher of The Verge, a tech news site and Vox Media's most visited homepage, said when people see AI summaries, they visit sites for information less often."

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/31/nx-s1-5484118/google-ai-overview-online-publishers

Tried the free trial of Kagi, the paid search engine.

It just expired, so I went back to the old world of Google and DuckDuckGo.

Immediately regretted it and signed up with a Kagi basic plan. Totally worth the 5 bucks a month.

#OpenAI recently #ended an #experiment where shared #ChatGPT #conversations were #indexed by #searchengines. While ChatGPT does not make conversations public by default, users may not anticipate that #sharedlinks will be indexed, potentially revealing #personalinformation. This practice mirrors #Google’s #indexing of #shared #GoogleDrive files. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/31/your-public-chatgpt-queries-are-getting-indexed-by-google-and-other-search-engines/?eicker.news #tech #media #news

"Consider AI Overviews, the algorithm-generated blurbs that often now appear front and centre when users ask questions. Fears that these would reduce the value of search-adjacent ads haven’t come to pass. On the contrary, Google says AI Overviews are driving 10 per cent more queries in searches where they appear and haven’t dented revenue. Paid clicks were up 4 per cent year on year, the company said in a call with analysts on Wednesday.

But as AI yields more, it costs more. Google’s capital expenditure on data centres and such trappings this year will now be about $85bn, versus its prior estimate of $75bn. That’s almost quadruple what the company spent in 2020, when AI was a glimmer in Silicon Valley’s eye. It’s also 22 per cent of the company’s expected revenue this year, according to LSEG, the highest annual level since 2006."

https://www.ft.com/content/7589393d-e562-46b7-9c43-5ffaf195e8d6

Alphabet Earnings Show 14% Revenue Increase as Google Faces A.I. Competition - Google’s parent company, which is facing aggressive competition in its core search busine... - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/technology/alphabet-google-earnings-ai.html #antitrustlawsandcompetitionissues #computersandtheinternet #artificialintelligence #companyreports #searchengines #alphabetinc #googleinc #chatgpt

"A Pew Research Center report published this spring analyzed data from 900 U.S. adults who agreed to share their online browsing activity. About six-in-ten respondents (58%) conducted at least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI-generated summary. Additional analysis found that Google users were less likely to click on result links when visiting search pages with an AI summary compared with those without one. For searches that resulted in an AI-generated summary, users very rarely clicked on the sources cited.

Here’s more of what we learned about Google AI summaries and how users interact with them.

Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one. Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).

A bar chart showing that Google users are less likely to click on a link when they encounter search pages with AI summaries.
Google users who encountered an AI summary also rarely clicked on a link in the summary itself. This occurred in just 1% of all visits to pages with such a summary.

Google users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary. This happened on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages with only traditional search results."

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/

Has anyone else on a mission to find a daily driver search engine that isn't Google or Bing given Mojeek a look? It's been around since 2004, with its own crawler and index of somewhere in the realm of 6-7 billion pages, all run from a data center in the UK run by Custodian Data Centres, who claim its one of the greenest in the country (can't vouch for the veracity of that claim; it's all news to me).

They've also been lamenting the state of search on the web for years, and discussing the need for more independent search indexes, so they seem to be on the right side of the fight. Obviously, corporations are not your friends, so yeah, that could change at any moment, but while I like SearXNG (when my preferred instance is fully operational; it was barely usable for the last day or two), and Startpage when it's not telling me I'm blocked for acting like a bot or using a VPN I'm definitely not using???, they're both still meta engines aggregating results from the usual suspects (in the case of SearXNG, a very flexible one that lets the end user choose which sources they want/don't want results from, but still), so I think there's value in having at least one other actual independent crawler with its own index, and much like web browsers, it's an increasingly difficult thing to do from scratch without VC money (Cliqz tried, but couldn't survive the pandemic).

Anyway, I set it as my default engine in LibreFox yesterday, and am going to trial it for at least a few days to see how it goes. Will report my findings.

And here's some hashtag spam (please do share your info/experiences, if so inclined): #search #searchengines #googlesearch #duckduckgo #mojeek #TryMojeekSearch #searxng

https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/blocking-independent-search-crawlers-07-17-25/

I read an interesting Hacker News comment by user dumbfounder (great username!) on Hacker News today. I excerpt the pertinent part below:

I created a search engine that crawled the web way back in 2003. I used a proper user agent that included my email address. I got SO many angry emails about my crawler, which played as nice as I was able to make it play. Which was pretty nice I believe. If it’s not Google people didn’t want it. That’s a good way to prevent anyone from ever competing with Google.

dumbfounder

I have had problems with bad crawlers (especially bad AI cralwers) on my sites. At the same time, dumbfounder highlights the reverse side of the coin. Many sites block good crawlers such as robots.txt-respecting crawlers for indepdent search engines. While all webmasters are free to control access to their sites as they see fit, allowing Google and other select big tech search crawlers while excluding small and independent search crawlers both limits search diversity and prevents people who may rely on small or niche search engines such as Mojeek, Marginalia, or Seznam from discovering potentially interesting writing. I previously published an article on this issue advocating for webmasters who want to support an open web and search engine diversity to ensure that good crawlers from independent search engines and directories can access their sites.

Search engines in a nutshell

#SearchEngines #Google #Bing #DuckDuckGo #ZoTop #SearxNG #Brave #Qwant #Startpage #SwissCows #Mojeek #Ecosia #Lilo #Stract #Marginalia #MullvadLeta #Kagi

https://www.jeey.net/google.html

"We are in a constant dialogue with Internet search engines, ranging from the mundane to the confessional. We ask search engines everything: What movies are playing (and which are worth seeing)? Where’s the nearest clinic (and how do I get there)? Who’s running in the sheriff’s race (and what are their views)? These online queries can give insight into our private details and innermost thoughts, but police increasingly access them without adhering to longstanding limits on government investigative power.

A Virginia appeals court is poised to review such a request in a case called Commonwealth v. Clements. In Clements, police sought evidence under a “reverse-keyword warrant,” a novel court order that compels search engines like Google to hand over information about every person who has looked up a word or phrase online. While the trial judge correctly recognized the privacy interest in our Internet queries, he overlooked the other wide-ranging harms that keyword warrants enable and upheld the search.

But as EFF and the ACLU explained in our amicus brief on appeal, reverse keyword warrants simply cannot be conducted in a lawful way. They invert privacy protections, threaten free speech and inquiry, and fundamentally conflict with the principles underlying the Fourth Amendment and its analog in the Virginia Constitution. The court of appeals now has a chance to say so and protect the rights of Internet users well beyond state lines."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/eff-tells-virginia-court-constitutional-privacy-protections-forbid-cops-finding

VormWeb

Search engine for .onion domains. Not too many indexed sites, but there are Darkglossary definition hints.

https://vormweb.de/en/

Is A.I. the Future of Web Browsing? - A test of the app Dia illustrates that the humble web browser may be the path to making a... - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/technology/personaltech/ai-internet-browser-dia.html #computersandtheinternet #artificialintelligence #contenttype:service #perplexityaiinc #anthropicaillc #searchengines #dia(browser) #browsercothe #webbrowsers #openailabs #start-ups

"Sixteen months have passed since we showed you how Google’s algorithm was killing independent websites by favoring big media publishers that were abusing their reputation to sell you bad products.

Since then, Google enforced a new spam guideline called “site reputation abuse” by removing entire sections of major websites from their search index… at least for a few months.

While this drama was unfolding, Google rolled out AI Overviews under the slogan, “Let Google do the searching for you.”

But are AI Overviews leading you to the best results on the web? Or is this just a new prime spot for selling you products you will regret buying? And how does this change affect the websites that made Google’s AI possible in the first place?

To find out, we spent weeks conducting research into air purifiers we reviewed (including models that don’t exist) to determine whether Google Search results and AI Overviews are leading consumers to good advice.

It turns out this rabbit hole is deeper than we thought, with ramifications that span major Reddit communities and could be leading you to scams and defamatory hallucinations.

I hope you’re ready for a long read because this article is packed with examples, fresh data and way too many screenshots."

https://housefresh.com/beware-of-the-google-ai-salesman/

As search engines in 2025 shift from providing links to (AI) answers — and all the angst that is causing web publishers — I thought I'd take a look at what search engines were like in 1998...one year before Google became popular. At that time search was seen as just one part of the portal experience. But little did AltaVista know, it wouldn't be the center of attention on @dannysullivan's Search Engine Watch for much longer. https://cybercultural.com/p/search-1998/ #InternetHistory #searchengines

Oh, before I forget, Happy International Take A Friend Or Family Members Phone And Install An Adblocker And Change Their Default Web Browser and Search Engine Away From Google Day

(you can also do this any day of the year)

DuckDuckGo is DuckDuckGone.
Bye Felicia.
See, this is what happens when you keep setting the AI & Search Assistant to ON whenever I open up my browser on a new day.
Let's see if Mojeek is any good as a search engine. I'm open to suggestions as it's always good to have options to explore.

Now, just need a new browser app for my phone. Any suggestions? Preferably without AI or at least something that honours user settings.

The browser I use on Android (Fennec F-Droid) just switched my default search engine back to Goggle, and what's worse, completely removed Mojeek and Brave as search options. This is an anti-feature!

It would be great if F-Droid builds of Android browsers stripped out the code that pulls dick moves like this.