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DDG has a noAI portal that filters out AI images and doesn't bother you with summations and things. it's available at noai.duckduckgo.com and you can add it as a separate search engine to Firefox thusly.
Does this do the same thing as turning off duck.ai in settings?
Isn't it better to put "q=%s" in Advanced, POST; instead of GETting it by having "?q=%s" in the URL?
And you can use the three dots menu on each link in the search results to file that a result is AI slop or otherwise not trustworthy and also filter domains from your future search results.
I'm going to say something spicy here, but for me personally, I've found DuckDuckGo's AI search summaries to be quite useful. Not for the actual AI summary text, but for the links they give, which are often better than the normal search results.
That being said, I could easily do without them.
As I said elsewhere, the problem is in fact that search engine providers deliberately make their search results worse to push AI usage. This keeps the user entirely under their control and at the same time hurts the websites the AI training data was stolen from, because no one will bother to visit them any more. I'm not saying DDG does this, but they get their search results from other search engines where this is the case.
Is that a documented fact that they make old search worse to promote AI?
Google for sure did, you can read about it here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Idk if DDG did similar or if they did, if it is documented.
Note that, reading the article & a recent follow up, it was moreso serving more ads that drove them to make results worse, rather than AI: the article was published in 2024, and refers to events starting in 2019. GPT2 got released around that time, way before ChatGPT (2022).
Still 100% enshittification though.
The fact that search engine results gotten worse itself and that this was done deliberately is well documented, and it is documented that Google and others have a history of trying to prevent users from clicking through to the actual websites and keeping them in their ecosystem. They have developed similar things in the past, like Google AMP.
I have no definitive proof that they worsen their search results for promoting AI, but if you look at this thing there are a lot of indicators for this to be true. Controlling what the user will see and where they will go next is vital for these companies and it's the reason why content algorithms exist and why they are creating "bubbles" to put individual users into. It's all about controlling the content the user will see. Now if you think about it and ask yourself if having an AI box dominating the upper half of the screen giving you answers that the search results below don't is beneficial to these goals, the answer is most likely yes.
Also you can do your own experiments which will make it pretty evident. Search for a few more obscure search terms. Use niche topics that will not yield a lot of results. In most cases the AI will nail it and the search results below won't. Even if you use advanced search techniques it is really difficult to get the information that the AI gave you as a regular search result. But when you ask the AI for a source you get a website which has the content you were looking for.
Now the question is: Why is the AI that much better than the regular search engine? If you have used Google in the past, only a few years ago, it was perfectly possible to get those results through regular search, which is now bordering on being impossible. Odd, isn't it? It seems like they gave AI a much bigger index to work with than their own search engine.
The fact that search engine results gotten worse itself and that this was done deliberately is well documented
Would love to read more about this if you or anyone has links
I don't have a link right now, but if you look it up at the usual suspects like wired, ars technica, the register, 404 media, or even Ed Zitron or Cory Doctorow, I'm sure you'll find plenty of stuff. The search degradation started around the time Sundar Pichai became CEO at Google and it made quite a splash during all that time. Also, there have been several "rollouts" in recent years which changed the search result appearance, content and the page rank algorithm over time, this was published by Google itself. They did of course not disclose how the algorithm works.
Thank you!
I have been wondering wether this is the case too. The search results on Google have really worsened the last few years, in my experience.
IMO that is a case of an unintended but welcome outcome for those companies
A spicier take still: I personally have found DDG's AI summaries useful even without further clicking. When one's query is purely technical (vs politics or whatever), I don't see any need to click dutifully.
While we're at it, I also like that they give me an AI chat that is ostensibly more private than alternatives for the times it's useful. And choosing different models is great.
Can I combine this with start.duckduckgo.com ?
And is there a mist of all the *.duckduckgo links?
Fan of DDG, but i find SearX with better results
I just repeated a very specific search I made earlier today on DDG using SearX for the first time. The results are very similar, with many identical links. SearX gave me more forum results versus listicles though. From a one shot it looks pretty good. I'll save it, thanks.
there’s also a yesai.duckduckgo.com version, lol
This can also be achieved just by changing DuckDuckGo's settings using the menu in the top-right corner of the page and can turn off other things including adverts if you want to.
That works as long as you have the cookies for it; it won't work in private browsing. Using OP's method works in private browsing, too.
Both are good.
There's a button "Show Bookmarklet and Settings Data" that saves all the settings to query parameters
I remember when cruise control first became widespread for cars. Most people didn't use it or barely used it. Some people, like me, did a lot of testing and figured out the best ways to use it, and ended up using it more than most. But then, there were people who just assumed it would work perfectly like they imagined, and used it as if it was a full-self-driving car, which immediately had bad results.
I think the worst thing about AI is that it lures people into fully trusting it, and they don't even realize that their cruise control car is heading off-road towards a cliff. AI can be a useful tool if you know what you're doing, but it is such a bad idea to have it on by default. Even a lot of fairly experienced users are tricked by AI. The average person doesn't have a chance. It's irresponsible to expose them to it.
I was going to mention about this whole thing with Winnebago and a driver assuming cruise control was FSD, but turns out that story is completely false. My father told me that story 10 years ago and I never thought to fact check it..
I don’t mind when it links to wiki but I actually follow the link to verify. It totally made up a pardon from the king of England to some guy yesterday
Yeah I have duck ai on. I'm a hypocrite. If it's some bullshit question I tend to go with it, but if it's anything remotely important I ignore it.
Somebody at work showed me keyword shortcuts ages ago and I have tons of them now.
Opera had this 20+ years ago. Once you get used to it, there's no going back.
I wonder if there is any difference between https://noai.duckduckgo.com/lite and https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite 🤔
To remove room for doubt of that just pushed to change default search engine of Konform Browser to noai domain.
Ty for reminding me of this!
I used DDG last night to search something with the hide ai images option checked and third result was from aiwallpapers.com
Yeah I know it's a new feature and there's gonna be some kinks but come on IT'S IN THE URL
There is also the no-java site, idk if it filters out ai images, but doesn't seem to have ai otherwise, no search assist.
Java is not Javascript. They're not even related. Netscape chose the name to profit from Java's poularity back in its' day.