This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
DDG still features AI enshittification, but at least one can opt-out... For now.
I don’t even care about an ai overview at the top. Give me a search engine that ranks down the sea of blogs that launched a year ago and have 5,000+ articles that are just ai generated bullshit designed to capture as many search queries as possible
Ecosia, ddg, google, brave, etc are all laden with this shit and it clogs up the searches. “How do I do x” and an endless stream of “achieving x is possible. Here’s a bulleted list of the next 12 paragraphs, then a bunch of summarized info from Reddit posts that only answers your question in the most basic obvious way and has no accounting for any kind of edge case or even just non traditional but acceptable use case. And even if you just wanted the basic answer its useless because the LLM fluffed the sentence long answer with 12 pages of meandering nonsense”
DDG isn't the holy grail people make it out to be; it has contracts with Microsoft and we all know how Microslop likes AI.
I hate that ddg has "show AI images" on by default
But I like that it has that toggle at least
Ironically, duck.ai is also the only AI provider I use because on top of having multiple models available, it has no login requirement so I just ask whatever stupid question and be on my way.
Until real Americans take their country back from the corrupt pedophile protecting "administration", I'll mostly avoid US search engines altogether.
Those who enable and finance the pedophiles are international... they won't disappear when Trump dies, they have old money and are multigenerational. Trump is just a stooge for international interests, like Epstein was.
See Deutsch Bank, for example... they financed Trump with billions of dollars, and broke the law to do so. Without them, Trump would not be President today.
Also, look at the funders of organizations like The Heritage Foundation; coincidentally, many members are shared between them and the Council on Foreign Relations. All of this will remain when Trump is gone.
That's great but...are people really downloading an app to search? Or are they talking about DDG browser?
Thats depressing. % stats like this always oversell it. There are probably not many people installing duckduckgo so a 30% increase is a small handful of users. I'd expect like 500% if there was actual pushback.
Shoutout to https://uruky.com/
It's a paid private search engine.
https://theprivacydad.com/interview-with-the-engineer-of-uruky-a-private-search-engine/
Trying them out right now, so far so good!
I appreciate their comparison to Kagi also notes Kagi's strengths.
I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine and have for a while. But I have noticed lately that every time I search for something, it almost always only returns product pages. I don't know if this is effective SEO or a way of DDG monetizing their search. But unfortunately I've been looking for alternatives just because it's so frustrating when searching for information to get nothing back but a bunch of sites trying to sell you their product.
Yeah I'm not a big fan of DDG either... it's powered by Bing so hardly surprising it isn't great. And Microsoft isn't any less evil than Google.
Presearch is the best I've found - just a nice, basic search - but it's a little slow and has some cryptoshit background so I'm open to alternatives. Ecosia is greenwashing bullshit afaik.
Thank you for making me discover unwall !
I never bother to disable AI in duckduckgo so I just use a search engine that doesn't have it out of the box
It's not even about disabling it, DDG keeps turning it back on.. I live in a constant battle.
are you sure it's not resetting because of your privacy settings
Clearing cookies will reset it because there is no way of ddg to know.
Which is crazy as they also made a big deal about how many users don't want an AI result and how they are credibly the choice for those people.
I get offering the feature, but insisting upon it while also bragging about how they cater to the majority of respondents that didn't like it is bizarre..
Google at least is consistent, they just plainly act as of the people who dislike it don't exist.
If you use the Voyager app, you can turn on “Always use reader mode” in the settings. It strips away the JavaScript and you won’t see those annoying messages.
It works it 95% of the articles, but there are a few that still have issues.
The amount of absolutely undue shit ddg got for innovating on par with literally every other search engine is ridiculous.
Kagi introduced the same AI search and got exactly zero shit.
DDG is not too bad, but when I click the sources from the AI search results, they often don’t contain the info from the search summary, so why even have it if it’s mostly a hallucination?
Because:
🎇 ✨ +10 Line go up! 🎇 ✨
