3d ago

DuckDuckGo Is Hoping to Win Over AI-Hating Searchers

gizmodo.com

The slop in search will continue until you give up on Google.

19 comments

Somewhat ironic given that DuckDuckGo has AI on by default. You have to either save the settings on the cloud or manually turn off AI when searching using DuckDuckGo. Still a good privacy search engine though.
- I wouldn't call it private as from my experience it uses browser fingerprinting to target users.
- You can have it off by default and not use a saved session if you add a custom search to the browser with https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s as the URL (or thereabouts, I'm typing from memory). (the %25s is just %s, I don't know why lemmy is adding that...)
  
  Good to know! But the out of the box version of DuckDuckGo.com does have AI on by default. I think it should be off by default.
- Wait, it has a quick blurb on by default but actually interacting with it requires an opt in. That seems like a good balance.
  In fact doing a search now (duck is my default) it doesn't even offer an ai answer unless I click it first.
"Let's mitigate AI hate by putting in more AI!"
- The AI is actually fairly useful and can be disabled.
Ironically, I left DuckDuckGo and switched to Kagi when DDG announced their AI.
- I don't get why you are marking a product for free. Stop kissing up to companies.
- Doesn't Kagi use AI as well now though?
  
  Yep, the Kagi Assistant. I think you can turn it off but like DDG it's on by default.
- Performative.
No idea if it's how I have things saved but DDG is just enough AI for me. If I want AI to answer a stupid question without making me bother with shitty SEO spam, great! If I want to find a site, I can! Not costing me anything near as I can tell.
I'm happy enough with DDG. Your use-case will vary.
But what about all the AI slop in the web results?
- It does also have the option to filter AI generated images from search results.
  
  I don't actually do all that many image searches. I'm usually searching for text based pages, and those results have also gotten super terrible, but this doesn't seem to have any impact on that.
It used to be when you searched for something, it was information first, products second. If you searched bicycle, it would give you the Wikipedia page for bicycle, and then pages related to bicycles, some of which would be retailers. Now it's the other way around, if the informational pages even show up at all.
Forget all the AI bullshit, this is my biggest gripe with search engines today. This is why people use ChatGPT - for all its faults - to search shit that Google used to answer. ChatGPT will confidently lie to you, but it least it gives you an answer instead of trying to sell something to you.
Their AI is only useful because the quality of search results has gotten so bad.

19 comments