DDG has a noAI portal that filters out AI images and doesn’t bother you with summations and things. it’s available at noai.duckduckgo.com and you can add it as a separate search engine to Firefox thusly.
I’m going to say something spicy here, but for me personally, I’ve found DuckDuckGo’s AI search summaries to be quite useful. Not for the actual AI summary text, but for the links they give, which are often better than the normal search results.
That being said, I could easily do without them.
As I said elsewhere, the problem is in fact that search engine providers deliberately make their search results worse to push AI usage. This keeps the user entirely under their control and at the same time hurts the websites the AI training data was stolen from, because no one will bother to visit them any more. I’m not saying DDG does this, but they get their search results from other search engines where this is the case.
Is that a documented fact that they make old search worse to promote AI?
Google for sure did, you can read about it here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Idk if DDG did similar or if they did, if it is documented.
Note that, reading the article & a recent follow up, it was moreso serving more ads that drove them to make results worse, rather than AI: the article was published in 2024, and refers to events starting in 2019. GPT2 got released around that time, way before ChatGPT (2022).
Still 100% enshittification though.
Wow that’s a really insightful article, I doubt a lot of people know about this, Thanks!
The fact that search engine results gotten worse itself and that this was done deliberately is well documented, and it is documented that Google and others have a history of trying to prevent users from clicking through to the actual websites and keeping them in their ecosystem. They have developed similar things in the past, like Google AMP.
I have no definitive proof that they worsen their search results for promoting AI, but if you look at this thing there are a lot of indicators for this to be true. Controlling what the user will see and where they will go next is vital for these companies and it’s the reason why content algorithms exist and why they are creating “bubbles” to put individual users into. It’s all about controlling the content the user will see. Now if you think about it and ask yourself if having an AI box dominating the upper half of the screen giving you answers that the search results below don’t is beneficial to these goals, the answer is most likely yes.
Also you can do your own experiments which will make it pretty evident. Search for a few more obscure search terms. Use niche topics that will not yield a lot of results. In most cases the AI will nail it and the search results below won’t. Even if you use advanced search techniques it is really difficult to get the information that the AI gave you as a regular search result. But when you ask the AI for a source you get a website which has the content you were looking for.
Now the question is: Why is the AI that much better than the regular search engine? If you have used Google in the past, only a few years ago, it was perfectly possible to get those results through regular search, which is now bordering on being impossible. Odd, isn’t it? It seems like they gave AI a much bigger index to work with than their own search engine.
The fact that search engine results gotten worse itself and that this was done deliberately is well documented
Would love to read more about this if you or anyone has links
I don’t have a link right now, but if you look it up at the usual suspects like wired, ars technica, the register, 404 media, or even Ed Zitron or Cory Doctorow, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of stuff. The search degradation started around the time Sundar Pichai became CEO at Google and it made quite a splash during all that time. Also, there have been several “rollouts” in recent years which changed the search result appearance, content and the page rank algorithm over time, this was published by Google itself. They did of course not disclose how the algorithm works.
Thank you!
I have been wondering wether this is the case too. The search results on Google have really worsened the last few years, in my experience.
IMO that is a case of an unintended but welcome outcome for those companies
While we’re at it, I also like that they give me an AI chat that is ostensibly more private than alternatives for the times it’s useful. And choosing different models is great.
I agree. I don’t trust the AI at all, but the links are quick and easy to use.
You can also set them to only show up when you click a button for them, which I always preferred.
This is perfect for my use case. I mostly think AI results are a waste of energy, but having them on demand can be useful.
Unfortunately not possible when using temporary containers
Temporary Containers Plus is a Firefox extension that puts all containerless tabs in temporary throwaway containers that get deleted soon after they become unused
It does, however, interfere with saving site settings because cookies won’t be saved.
Could you maybe get around that with a greasemonkey (or preferred addon) script?
A spicier take still: I personally have found DDG’s AI summaries useful even without further clicking. When one’s query is purely technical (vs politics or whatever), I don’t see any need to click dutifully.
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Me too, but fair warning to double check on the links if it is something niche. Perplexity can not always be trusted to interpret limited information properly. It does a pretty good job on enough for me to use it though.
Does this do the same thing as turning off
duck.aiin settings?
And you can use the three dots menu on each link in the search results to file that a result is AI slop or otherwise not trustworthy and also filter domains from your future search results.
Isn’t it better to put “q=%s” in Advanced, POST; instead of GETting it by having “?q=%s” in the URL?
Somebody at work showed me keyword shortcuts ages ago and I have tons of them now.
What are those?
Well I’m so glad you asked!!
You’re looking at one in the screenshot. Firefox does this, as does Chrome and some other browsers as well.
A bookmark keyword is a tiny bit of text that you can configure your browser to treat differently when you use it in the location bar.
Typically, whatever you type into the browser location bar will either treat that text like a website you’re trying to go to (like “apnews.com” or “ www.wikipedia.org ”) or text that gets sent to a search engine (like “tasty dinner ideas” or “best white socks”). However, if the text you enter starts with a bookmark keyword you’ve set up, the browser will insert the rest of the text you entered into a website address in a specified place.
This is typically useful to speed up searching on specific websites.
So if you want to search Wikipedia for “particle physics”, you can go to the Wikipedia website and enter “particle physics” into the search box and click the search button. That would send you to a page with search results of the text you entered. If you look at the location bar, you should see a URL that looks like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=particle+physicsWhat we notice here is that the text you entered, “particle physics” is right there in the URL.
To turn this into a bookmark keyword, you create a bookmark to this search results page, then replace your search term with the characters “%s”, so the bookmark URL would look like so:
Then, in the “keyword” box, you can enter whatever text you want to use for this shortcut. For Wikipedia, I like using just the letter ‘w’. (You don’t need quotes around it.) Save the bookmark, and that’s it.
Now, whenever you want to search Wikipedia, all you have to do is type “w particle physics” or “w forest fires” or “w whatever” into the location bar and the browser will take you directly to the search page with those results.
You can do this with basically any website with search functionality: search engines, retail stores, news, IMDb, reference resources, whatever.
This feature also can be used for going to detail pages directly if you have a specific reference number.
So let’s say you’re at work and you have a trouble ticketing system that shows details of ongoing issues. The URL for ticket number q-rt-654321 might look like this:
https://troubletickets.mycompanyfoo.biz/ticket/q-rt-654321/viewSo if you had the ticket number handy (like from an email chain), you could create a bookmark keyword to go directly to the ticket detail page:
https://troubletickets.mycompanyfoo.biz/ticket/%s/view…and use the keyword “tt” for trouble ticket.
Now you can just type “tt q-rt-654321” into the location bar and go right to the detail page (presuming the ticket number is accurate).
And that’s it.
Cool thanks for the explanation, I’m off to make some bookmark keywords!
I already knew about using this for search, but the ticket example is another great use I didn’t think of at all! Totally using this, thanks.
I suppose this is faster than using !bangs on ddg
Opera had this 20+ years ago. Once you get used to it, there’s no going back.
I don’t mind when it links to wiki but I actually follow the link to verify. It totally made up a pardon from the king of England to some guy yesterday
Yeah I have duck ai on. I’m a hypocrite. If it’s some bullshit question I tend to go with it, but if it’s anything remotely important I ignore it.
Fan of DDG, but i find SearX with better results
SearX is deprecated whereas SearXNG however, is its successor.
SearXNG is not a search engine but an aggregator, it’ll utilize whatever search engines it’s configured with to output results.
I just repeated a very specific search I made earlier today on DDG using SearX for the first time. The results are very similar, with many identical links. SearX gave me more forum results versus listicles though. From a one shot it looks pretty good. I’ll save it, thanks.
But it should really be “ai.duckduckgo.com” and off by default.
If you see AI you need to duck, duck again then go (as fast as you can)
I wonder if there is any difference between https://noai.duckduckgo.com/lite and https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite 🤔
To remove room for doubt of that just pushed to change default search engine of Konform Browser to noai domain.
Ty for reminding me of this!
I don’t trust DuckDuckGo. I think they’re… Too clean, too friendly, too invested in the “teehee we are a cool brand” image. They’re also offering things that don’t make sense for a for profit organization (you can simply disable the ads? For free? And still use their infrastructure?).
I’d bet ten years from now we figure out they are indeed collecting user data, valuable user data because it comes from lowering the guards of users that otherwise block data collection attempts. For a government, for other companies, or both.
Listed: not a single legitimate reason to distrust them.
What do you think of their audits?
Apple also promised they were squeaky clean with your data. Snowden came along and shattered this illusion.
Even “independent” audits are not universally trust worthy.
Yes, but then at that point of distrust, we’d just be better living a caveman life without internet. Gotta draw the line somewhere!
Or I can use a self hosted SearXNG instance and not be a caveman? Or I can use the tool, but not glaze it online spreading it to others as if trust was a given?
And how do we know you’re not a Russian bot account?
You sound too squeaky clean….
You’re totally free to distrust me. I’m not sure how you think this would be a gotcha.
If I asked for your personal data and you gave it to me, I’d think you’re naive.
There is also the no-java site, idk if it filters out ai images, but doesn’t seem to have ai otherwise, no search assist.
there’s also https://lite.duckduckgo.com/
AAAA wtf im trying to post the URL parameter for easy copying, but it always gets converted to this
Where the fuck is that 25 coming from?
If i write /?q=%s seperately like this its not problem. This even happens on mobile, so its just not allowed to post this kind of link for some reason.
Oh without the https:// it doesnt happen
It’s getting encoded. % is a special character in URIs. Let me try posting it inside of back ticks, as well as triple back ticks:
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25shttps://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25sI’ve noticed that there’s a plague of threadiverse clients which improperly escape/encode URIs. It’s most evident with how they mangle parenthesis in Wikipedia article titles.
%20 is the URL-encoded form of a space; %25 is the URL-encoded form of the percent sign. The URL you are posting gets re-encoded and % becomes %25 (in the same way that a space becomes %20)
It’s encoding your URL into the correct format for your Browers URL bar. “%25” is the encoded version of “%”, so it’s being replaced.
It’s obviously incorrect in this instance since it’s not an actual URL. Maybe it wouldn’t happen if you’re able to put the URL string into a code block?
Why tf is http not unicode yet?
…or to Vivaldi, or vanilla Chrome, or any other browser that has search engine options in its Settings.
Even edge has that nowadays.
I saw a similar post recently and was recommended Kagi. Gave it a shot and I’m a few months in now, no regrets.
Also just made that my chrome homepage. Tried Firefox a couple times before but its even more bloated
