Try SearXNG. SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, SearXNG can be used over Tor for online anonymity.
No, VLC is its own thing however it uses libavcodec from the FFmpeg project for a large number of the codecs included in VLC. But VLC is far from being just an FFmpeg GUI.
DDG is still the best non self host search engine imao. But Startpage and Swisscows are also great options and don’t have the AI stuff and some neat features like private preview (both) or music search (swisscows). Of those two options startpage is superior in privacy
I'm currently stuck using DuckDuckGo myself, just with the AI fluff disabled in settings. I've tried various other search engines but they're either also buying in the LLM hype, or are just Not There Yet™ (https://stract.com, for example), or both.
They claim not to save your chats and not to use them for improving the AI model. Using GPT-3.5 Turbo through DuckDuckGo is definitely better than using your phone number to sign up for an OpenAI account, so yes, I think it makes sense to use this. But ideally, you could just run an AI model offline on your own hardware, I recently saw a Lemmy comment that explains this very well: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/10348570
To hell with anything using this AI garbage. Apparently I'm going to have to completely stop using computers because all these idiot companies are using this trash technology that just steals from other sites and presents it as its own. Time to move on from DDG.
Honestly their results have been absolute shit for a while now. All I get are big business (mostly MS with Bing) results like Amazon links or worst yet, some BS AI built website with poorly stolen info meant to just push visitor traffic and not actually provide value.
I’ve been looking into alternates and find Yandex actually provides real results. They don’t blacklist either something all the major US engines do because DMCA.
At this point it’s like to I give up privacy and get real results or stick with DDG that seems in MS’ pocket so I have little trust they are still anonymizing your results.
As unfortunate as it is, the only way privacy search engines will survive is by adding AI. Brave recognized this early on and implemented it very well, so I'm glad to see DDG seems to be implementing it well also. Hopefully Startpage catches up because even though I almost exclusively use Brave Search, I do enjoy Startpage as a secondary source.