DDG is almost all AI slop results now. Even worse than google.
Ironic since DuckDuckGo has AI too
Opt in AI
no it’s opt out
“Opt In” that keeps turning itself back on.
Ddg:
Ran https://voteyesornoai.com/ Where of 175k people, 90% said No AI
Offers noai.duckduckgo.com, presumably to cater to this 90% who don’t want it.
Has AI first features in main product. Does not advertise noai much.
So…
- It’s primary product goes against it’s market research
- It’s pushing AI, not promoting the alternative
- People keep promoting ddg for (2) despite (1)
Just seems weird.
Additionally, people told me that DDG is in bed with Microsoft. If that’s true, I guess Ecosia is hopefully better.
I’m on ecosia, it also has AI as default, at least it’s easy to turn off :/
why does a search engine that’s marketed as eco-friendly use ai?
DDG is not in bed with microsoft. DDG uses Bing search index to show its search results alongside wikipedia and others they can.
Ecosia also uses Bing alongside its own search index. Except Mojeek, Qwant there are very few Independent search engines which don’t use Bing or Google as its search index.
Oh, okay, whew. I wonder how SearXNG instances measure up…
Iirc, they explained it on techlore talks like “it"s X% of those who responded in $site, while many qactual users prefer or don’t oppose it”, or smth of that nature. Also, it appears far less than on google even with constant cookie clearing
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I would like to direct the reader to Yacy. It’s a free-software, self-hosted search-engine. Users have the option to peer with other users, creating a larger decentralised search engine.
Build it. Use it. Promote it. Finance it. Bupf it, for short. Build the future you want or piss and moan endlessly.
Cool! Would this be much different then say SearXNG? I know SearXNG relies on google, DDG etc to formulate its searches.
Neat. Reminds me of bitmagnet, which crawls BitTorrent’s DHT to built a searchable index of torrents. It lacks a peer option though.
I ran it for an hour and calculated that it would use over 1TB/month of bandwidth, which is too much for my data cap :(
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I switched because every time I tried to google something on my phone I got literally 10-15 captchas in a row and it was taking so long.
Been pretty happy with Qwant for the past month now. I do not really miss google. I set it as default on all my devises so I wouldn’t forget to use it. Now I prefer it. So nice to not having the entire screen filled with AI, sponsored irrelevant links and 99% SEO spam. I feel qwant has more nuanced results.
Just “qwanted” a tech site name on mobile and the first two results were online gambling sites. Had to scroll to start seeing actual results. Not a great start.
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The problem isn’t the LLM summary (easy to disable, what’s the issue there?), but the SEO garbage in the results.
I want to like DDG (and tend to use it for “easy” searches), but what’s the point if search atrophies?
Yep I’ve found this too. DDG has more SEO / AI slop search results than nearly any other search engine.
Yeah.
They must be thinking about getting away from Bing, or at least sanitizing the results somehow.
But why do they not make this the default, and set ai.duckduckgo.com instead? Their real agenda is so obviously much more sinister that it’s almost certainly better to just avoid altogether.
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It’d be great if DDG’s search was actually better rather than just an alternative. I’ve been using DDG for years and I’m still having to use other search engines because DDG’s results aren’t good or it pulls a google and gives you the same results no matter how many different ways you query.
You should know:
dont tell me what to do
On DDG is “Search Assist” the same thing as “Duck.ai?” Must confess that the former can be extremely useful sometimes, as long as I check its references.
I think the most notable feature of ddg ai is that its not invasive, and as someone else has said here it can actually be useful. AI is like everything, you need to decide when it can actually add value. If i’m searching for some linux command, ai is brilliant. If i’m doing reasearch i may use ai asking for all references and then i go and check the references using search feature. Sometimes i just use search.
Search assist is powered by AI.
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I don’t mind Google. I’ve been using it to figure out how to build a home made mobility scooter, and it’s working quite well.
I’ve been using kagi for quite some time and still happy with it.
Obviously not everyone will be willing to pay for search. But at least my data isn’t getting harvested.
+1
kagi has the best search results for me, results are often more relevant than Google’s results. DDG has awful results and I often end up using !g on DDG because I don’t get any relevant results.
I found Quant and DDG kinda sucky to be honest. I am experimenting with just having Tor open on my second screen with google. Might try Kagi at some point
I use mostly EU search engines without AI (Startpage, Metager, Mojeek…)
