Google is going to look very different, and if you’re not a fan of the AI Overviews feature, then you’re not going to like what’s coming.
At its Google I/O 2026 keynote this week, the company announced that it was overhauling Search to take an AI-powered conversational approach, even inviting users to recruit AI agents to automatically notify them if, say, their favorite band was going on tour.
“This is the biggest upgrade to our iconic search framework since it debuted more than 25 years ago,” said Elizabeth Reid, head of Google’s Search organization.
Now, when you search on Google, you are given the option to use the AI feature right from the start. Even if you choose not to use the AI feature, you may receive a search result with an AI Overview, which will now include a chat box to ask follow-up questions. Once you open the chat box, Google starts to look more like ChatGPT than the search engine that has been ingrained in our lives for decades.
This announcement did not generate the reaction that Google would have hoped for. Instead, many users see this as yet another example of a tech company cramming AI agents and chatbots into everything it can, making it impossible to navigate the web without encountering a chatbot. Especially after the difficult launch of Google’s AI Overviews — remember when Google told people to look at the sun? — users are not willing for another customization.
In Google’s video announcing the Search updates, one commenter wrote, “this is the best ad to let people know it’s time to get a different search engine.”
They make a good point. The new Google Search, which Reid describes as “AI search through and through,” is bound to alienate users. In addition to genetic artificial intelligence, some users are also tired of Google for its absolute dominance – a US district court ruled in 2024 that Google had acted illegally to maintain a monopoly on online search.
If you’re curious about alternative search engines, you’re in the right place. Here are some places to start (or, embrace the chaos and see where Open Web Engine takes you).
Kagi
Before Google’s AI Review bothered us, we were bothered by ads. Ads are non-negotiable for Google — that’s how Google Search makes money. But if a search engine ran without ads, could it make money?
That’s what Kagi is trying to accomplish. For $5 a month — or $10 for unlimited searches — you can get access to an ad-free search engine with no AI reviews.
Kagi isn’t just an ad-free Google. The search engine also allows users to customize their search experience by allowing them to filter certain websites and refine search results with “lenses”. If you’re in school, for example, you can use Kagi’s academic lens to find journal articles on a topic, rather than blog posts.
If you find Google’s AI Reviews useful from time to time, then you can use Kagi’s AI-powered Quick Answer feature to summarize an answer to your search and include links to its sources. But if you don’t want those AI summaries, guess what? You don’t need to create them.
DuckDuckGo
Maybe you don’t want to pay to look things up online. This is understandable. DuckDuckGo offers a free search engine that makes money by selling ads, but unlike Google, it does not collect user data in the form of search, browsing, and purchase history. Instead, DuckDuckGo chooses which ads to show based on the topic of your search — so if you search for concert tickets, you might see an ad for SeatGeek.
Like many alternative search engines, DuckDuckGo has a Google-like interface — and like Google, it can display an AI-generated answer to a question in your search results. But if that bothers you, DuckDuckGo totally lets you do it opt out of AI functions in the settings menu.
Homepage
While DuckDuckGo has its own separate search index from Google, Startpage is a proxy for Google.
This means that Homepage acts as a middleman between you and the tech giant. When you search for something on the Home Page, the company removes personal data like your IP address from your query, sends it to Google via the cloud, and returns the information to you. Well, it’s Google without Google knowing who you are. The downside is that it’s still Google. At least Startpage lets you turn off AI features.
&udm=14
What if you took Startpage and made it simpler? The search engine &udm=14 named for the character string it adds to all your Google searches.
If you add &udm=14 to your Google searches, you’ll get the same Google results, just without the AI overview. But doing it yourself after every search is pretty annoying. So &udm=14 does it automatically for you.
The developer even put in the code GitHub so you can run your own version of &udm=14 if that’s your thing.
If you’re concerned about privacy, then you’d probably prefer Startpage over &udm=14, but both will give you Google without AI.
Brave
Brave offers both a browser and a search engine. Since the browser is built on Chromium, which is the same open source foundation as Google Chrome, you can use Chrome extensions on the Brave browser. So if you don’t want to use Google Chrome but can’t function without the LastPass plugin, Brave could be for you.
On the search front, Brave allows users to apply specific third-party (non-Google!) “Glasses” to their searches, which curate the results. These include “News from the Right”, “News from the Left”, “Tech Blogs”, and some other more specialized options, such as “Hacker News/1k short”, which prioritizes common domains mentioned in Y-Combinator’s Hacker News forum, but without the 1,000 most popular domains, so it skips more mainstream sites. Then there’s “No Pinterest,” which is pretty self-explanatory (and funny).
And yes, Brave lets you turn AI features on and off. There’s no reason you can’t do this, Google.
Household
Like Brave, Household it also offers a browser and search engine and is also built on top of Chromium, which means Chrome plugins should work on Ecosia as well. As its name suggests, the main advantage of Ecosia is that it is supposed to be more environmentally friendly than other search platforms.
Ecosia earns money from advertising, but donates about 80% of its revenue to tree-planting initiatives around the world. Tree planting can sometimes be a red flag for green washingbut Ecosia works with communities involved in local reforestation efforts, it publishes monthly financial reports for transparency and histology for the real impact of her efforts.
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