this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
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AI is the future of search and I dont see anyway that changes. The user experience of AI search is way to good, average users love the summary at the top of their search. Almost every report i've seen shows over 50% of people using AI for search and that tracks with what I see in people i know in real life.
I'm a DDG user and I do not want them to handicap themselves to pass a purity test.
Of course they do, 50% of the users don't fucking know how to disable it or that you can change search engine
People are intentionally going to LLM chatbots to search. This is not including viewing of AI summaries as AI search.
Ai search results are ass
Asses are cute sometimes. They can also be great for sex!
Neither virtue possessed by "ai" search results.
Thought terminating cliches are the future of online discourse.
Search engine companies went out of their way to make normal searches worse, and then introduced AI search to keep you on their sites.
I thought everybody at this point understood enshittification at this point, but if not: of course a project at the first stage of enshittification acts better than a different product at the third stage of it.
Sloppers are like enemies of the concept of truth just for it's own sake, which is a bizzaire level of evil I never expected to see.
Its not a thought terminating cliche if you didnt cut the next word out. You can argue if AI is the future of search, I think there is a strong case that its proven very good at general information retrieval.
How did search engine companies go out of their way to make normal searches worse? I search I get relevant results and its been that way for the past 20 years. Nothing has changed that has made search worse than it was 5 years ago. The only change is that people have recently gotten a choice between a google search or a chatgpt question and they were increasingly choosing chatgpt. fast forward to current day and that divide has only increased.
"Of"? I assume you mean the next two words, but not only doesn't it change anything, I think it makes my response match even better. So I added them to the quote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching
This used to be a bare bones version of what you could do on literally every search engine. I had a high school class about this. 50/50 whether you got a 'business' teacher who didn't know how to open PDF or the librarian who'd go on digressions about information theory and optimal solutions.
In the late 2010s google followed immediately by other large search engines started removing these features and actively showing users worse results so they would do more searches and get shown more ads.
Your shit won't fly here, slopper.
You can still search on search engines some searches dont even have any ads. So what feature was removed? They actively started showing worse results ok what did they do?
Search engines still search same as they did in the 2010s. They have had ads for decades. It hasnt increased you search you see an ad or two or even none.
Your replies are equivalent to AI slop. If you are going to write something please at least think about what you are writing.
Bad faith slopper lies. Why bother to copy-paste? What are you using to generate BTW.
None of what ive said is AI generated. You're just a moron.
I do a lot of searching, both for my day job and for personal use.
Search engines are shit nowadays. The first page of results is consistently either a list of copy pasted llm-generated nonsense, or like reddit posts from 4-5 years ago.
I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that they have gotten measurably worse even just looking back, say, 18 months. To the point they are barely usable nowadays.
It seems hard to believe that this wasn’t on purpose in order to peddle their stupid llm chatbot, when it happened so consistently at the same time.
Not saying search engines weren’t getting worse before, but it was cranked up to insane levels recently.
Do you think its because there is a lot more spam and SEO than 10 years ago or do you think google is actively doing something to remove relevant results from searches?
Spam and SEO have been big things for way longer than 10 years.
Then opt in. We shouldn't have to opt out to avoid padding the AI numbers.
Its a generalized product targeting average people. Average people dont care AI/No AI they want the results and they use the AI summaries. If DDG hid it then they would just think it doesnt exist and go use google which provides them faster more convenient results.
We’re talking about the same duckduckgo that had a huge poll about this right? The only data point that exists regarding what people want is that of the 175,354 users who took the poll, only 10% wanted AI features.
And I bet those 10% were willing to opt in. Fucking sloppers incapable of giving a shit about truth. They want to kill the very concept. They're literally enemies of truth. Even fucking skeletor didn't hate the fucking concept of truth.
Yes we are talking about ddg which has roughly 100 million users and put out a poll to which 175k said they didnt want AI.
What’s neat about an open poll like the one they ran is that it includes most of the people who care about weighing in. Maybe you can read an AI summary about statistically relevant sample sizes? It might be more useful to learn about the math, or to skip the summary and find a useful website, like this calculator from Qualtrics that will show you that a sample size of 175,000 is more than 10 times what you’d need to achieve a roughly 99% level of confidence with a 1% margin of error.
You're assuming that everyone who didn't answer the poll is for AI, not exactly a good assumption considering the poll results.
Im not making that assumption at all.
You're constantly arguing that the sample is so strongly skewed against your position that the proportion of people who want AI is over 4 times (!) as much as in the sample. "Everyone" is an exaggeration, but the point remains. If you believe the sample is that skewed, then you have to provide evidence.
Also, in my experience people who dislike AI features are often more tech-savvy in my experience. And tech-savvy people tend to know "hidden" subdomains such as "noai." and how to change the default engine's URL string whereas non-savvy tend to not know that.
So even if the majority would be against these AI features it might make more sense to make AI the default and noai opt-in. Because you'd lose more non-savvy people having no-AI as default than you lose tech-savvy people with having AI as default (I assume).
Maybe im to tech-brained but I dont think its a technical barrier. I think that they just dont care enough. One search of "how to remove AI from DDG" would bring it up but they never care about the issue enough to take that first step.
I sometimes observe this with my family members, who will complain "oh I dont like how it does X" and I say you can turn that off in the settings and then they dont. It was a minor complain they had but not an actual complain they wanted to solve.
Maybe DDG should do the firefox route of a popup to disable all AI for new users.
Having a search algorithm be AI based and having an LLM summary of "the web" is two completely different things.
DDG provides both so they can keep up because its what users expect from a search engine now.
Because it's not possible to search without there being an AI summary
No these are not reports that count someone viewing an AI summary on google as using AI for search.
then how do they count it? home else could someone be counting "AI usage in the search engine"?
I checked again to get a more up to date report and so that we actually have something to go off instead of my memory of some random reports. Pew finds 50% of people use chatbots and the most common use is searching for information. Also in the report the have a stat for reading AI summaries at the top of a search and that is 60% say that have, 10% dont know and 30% dont read it. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/
So its fair to say I was wrong and its not over 50% but its close to 50%.
Personally I actually like the A.I. summaries… IF it shows its sources. That way it essentially acts as it should, a summary of the search results, and I can click the link that actually is relevant to what I wanted to find in the first place. It skips that step where you have to open the first 5 links and comb through them to find which one is the useful one.
I know most people don't click those links and just trust the summary directly, but it's important to me personally. Unfortunately those links only appear sometimes, often you just get plain text with no links.
On DDG you get the sources its summarizing from. Im not sure about google, i dont use it.
Didn't google actively degrade their search engine to force more adverts in. and I should imagine a further degradation since AI summery to make us more dependent.
I'm looking forward to when AI fully closes-in, people are deskilled and the key holders are able to pump coercive non explicit adverting into AI, we won't even realize we had been sold something we didn't already want /s
People have said that and ive read a few studies. Its a truism because the search quality degraded but mostly due to SEO and link spam. If someone wants to post actual evidence of google "actively making search worse" I'd love to read it. So far i only saw that it was due to SEO spam which affects all search providers. While people here are trying to claim it was done nefariously to force people towards AI.
I dont think AI summary is ever going to be something people NEED. In most cases its better and it will cover majority of searches but its unlikely to cover 100% of cases. You will always need to be able to find things on the web like links.
AI in other areas its not even looking bad for workers. Its largely overhyped from what I see. Programming seems the most useful field but even then its like x0.1 or x0.2 boost in efficiency. This year it got much better. Maybe things will change next year I'll have to see.
I've seen a few articles going over this memo, here's one article discussing it:
https://rudevulture.com/journalist-explains-why-google-deliberately-made-its-search-engine-worse/
And when I say deskilled, I didn't mean in the work space, but inability to source information themselves...
Its wrong though. Its wrong so fucking often. There's no way to fix that.
Ignoring the schizo half of your question, what would be an acceptable error rate for you?
That's relative to the confidence with which its presented. Ten results on a page? I dunno. Only one of them needs to fit, and I can refine my search or check page two.. Or used to be able to, before they disabled those features.
A statement at the top of the page? Pretty fucking low. Variable depending on topic, some as low as 0%.
Get fucked sloppy. You're ruining the world and replacing critical infrastructure for the sake of dystopian bullshit that might collapse at any moment. You're going to have been cheer leading it along. I hope you end up homeless and hungry-a lot of other people will, but you'll fucking deserve it.
How is a summary at the top of the page different from the first result? If you are fine with the first result being incorrect I dont see why you wouldnt also accept the summary to be sometimes wrong. There are still 10 results for you to pick from and infinite pages to scroll through.
If it depends on the confidence do you need them to put a disclaimer? If I'm looking for something important I'm going to actual documentation and skipping the summary even when its correct. But if I'm just searching for something low stakes and the summary answers my question I am happy to not dig any further and I consider it to be an improvement on the search experience.
These days its pretty accurate. I rarely come across a summary thats incorrect. Mostly I see incorrect summaries on searches where i already know I'm going to get a lot of wrong answers and have to sift through sites and old posts.
Okay you can't be discussed with. Am I even talking to a human being? Are you asking grok for arguments? Arguing with sloppera is pointless. Everything it's saying is disingenuous missing the point or shows fabulous ignorance.
You can't discuss it because you have no coherent reasoning behind why you arrived at your position. You are a reactionary who knows very little and parrots what you hear.
If you dont want to use AI fine but you're wasting your time trying to discuss it when you have nothing about it to discuss. This is a technology community not an anti AI schzio ranting community.
Make the argument as to why its not suitable.
Poor slop baby asking grok for an argument to own the libs. I get it wouldn't even be able to do that.