Been trying to get away from DuckDuckGo because of their support of "AI" stuff, but come on, one of these isn't even in English, and that's what I have my language set to.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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I know. I'm trying not to use DuckDuckGo because of their AI support. I was told this was a good search engine to use instead, but it often spits random stuff back at me.
The
noai.duckduckgo.comURL is important to notice in the screenshot.im guessing op is aware that you can turn ai off, but generally opposed to using duckduckgo since they are generally a pro ai company
Possibly, though as another commenter mentioned, using the noai URL for the moment is a good way to voice discontent. Not using it just falls into the "everyone uses google" narrative in a different way.
https://voteyesornoai.com/
If DDG's own poll didn't spell that out for them, I don't think they care.
Yeah, fair point. I wish DDG were going in a different direction.
Well that's interesting as a poll result. 👍
The article behind the link at the bottom of the site shows that this is a marketing stunt
the poll numbers are still 😇
You really do either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.
SearXNG is a mixed bag to be honest...I find that Ononoki's SearXNG delivers decent results...It's a bit mixed at times with PieFed being the third option. Some topics are surfaced better than others, so your mileage will vary with SearXNG.
Using the No AI version of DuckDuckGo sends them a message that their bet on "AI" isn't going to win them any accolades. It's an easy way to push back. As they are tracking those metrics and people can see the numbers of how many users disapprove of AI.
Bing and yahoo are VERY bad, it seems they detect that they are being used through proxies, I made another comment for what i use in searxng.
DDG's backend is really just Bing, though ...
They give different results, it seems they have different treatment to the data, which is interesting. Startpage gives different results than google, duckduckgo gives different results than bing, but on the bigger picture, a bigger sample gives the statistically optimal result??? (closer to the source truth on the most probable good result) question mark, huge number theory on statistics.
(i'm drunk)
Bing in a sandboxed session yielded results identical to DDG in my experiments.
In searxng they don't give the same results, bing brings some completely different stuff both on an selfhosted instance and on an public instance (it just gives random garbage), it seems proxying does some stuff to bings internal algorithm, as google is different than startpage on searxng.
Edit: a screenshot showing it.
Given the same methodology (search algorithm) a larger sample size gives a truer picture of what that methodology favors. If the methodology isn't neutral or doesn't bias in the same way as your desired outcome then a smaller sample size analyzed by a different methodology may provide better results.
Ah shit, I forgot to turn both those off. Ugh, I've been playing browser shuffle...Good catch!
It's just Bing wearing a duck hat anyway
What search engine?
I use brave search, in the settings you can turn off ai answer and anonymous telemetry
So you know:
CEO is a anti-vaxxer anti-masker asshole, and incredibly pro-AI and pro-crypto.
Also the browser did at one point "accidentally" have a crypto farm built into it.
I'm so tired of the insistence that you have to agree with everything that the CEO does or says if you use a piece of software... You can turn off the ai and crypto in browser settings with a couple clicks. Also I'm talking about the search engine not the browser. I don't use the browser purely because the Linux builds split mode doesn't work nearly as clean as Zen, plus i prefer Firefox forks
I use it cause it's a search engine that gives good results and that can disable ai answers... Until I'm able to get my server PC finished to selfhost searxng
Edit they actually slopped up the browser to the point it's beyond disabling it. Literally just garbage
I don't care what a CEO (for free software) thinks or says I care what the software does. Is the software good?... The browser no. It's complete garbage the search engine. Yeah it's pretty decent. If the CEO's garbage ideals bleed into the software like it does in the browser, yeah it's trash. The search engine like almost every other mainstream search engine has AI answers except unlike a lot of others it lets you turn that off. It doesn't skew results towards his ideals, doesn't bury results under sponsored links, Has no crypto nonsense, it's just a search engine. It's not that deep
I'll just leave this here: https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/
Nice to find an up to date article, thanks
it seems crazy to me that people still use brave--i've been reading nothing but terrible shit about them for years
Same, been there too. Still, it's easy to miss articles on them, they only pop up once every so often. Same for Proton.
very helpful ty!