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.
Isn’t it better to put “q=%s” in Advanced, POST; instead of GETting it by having “?q=%s” in the URL?
Does this do the same thing as turning off
duck.aiin settings?
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 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!
Can I combine this with start.duckduckgo.com ?
And is there a mist of all the *.duckduckgo links?
Yes you can, by using the settings: https://start.duckduckgo.com/settings#aifeatures
Fan of DDG, but i find SearX with better results
SearX is deprecated whereas SearXNG however, is its successor.
SearXNG is not a search engine but an aggregator, it’ll utilize whatever search engines it’s configured with to output 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
I saw a similar post recently and was recommended Kagi. Gave it a shot and I’m a few months in now, no regrets.
Also just made that my chrome homepage. Tried Firefox a couple times before but its even more bloated
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Wow that’s a really insightful article, I doubt a lot of people know about this, Thanks!
IMO that is a case of an unintended but welcome outcome for those companies
Same for me with Perplexity.
Me too, but fair warning to double check on the links if it is something niche. Perplexity can not always be trusted to interpret limited information properly. It does a pretty good job on enough for me to use it though.
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.
I agree. I don’t trust the AI at all, but the links are quick and easy to use.
You can also set them to only show up when you click a button for them, which I always preferred.
Unfortunately not possible when using temporary containers
Temporary Containers Plus is a Firefox extension that puts all containerless tabs in temporary throwaway containers that get deleted soon after they become unused
It does, however, interfere with saving site settings because cookies won’t be saved.
Could you maybe get around that with a greasemonkey (or preferred addon) script?
This is perfect for my use case. I mostly think AI results are a waste of energy, but having them on demand can be useful.
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.
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
Saving this for later. Thank you!
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 have a link, but I am sure I saw it on the news in the early or mid 90s. But one thing I have learned recently is that many of the “news” articles about cars are invented stories planted by other car companies.
Like one recent thing you’d have seen is stories about electric cars catching fire. It seemed that every time any electric car caught fire, it was national news, but non-electric cars catch fire frequently, as well.
So anyways, long story… less long, the story I’m remembering might have been fake, as well.
thanky
I don’t trust DuckDuckGo. I think they’re… Too clean, too friendly, too invested in the “teehee we are a cool brand” image. They’re also offering things that don’t make sense for a for profit organization (you can simply disable the ads? For free? And still use their infrastructure?).
I’d bet ten years from now we figure out they are indeed collecting user data, valuable user data because it comes from lowering the guards of users that otherwise block data collection attempts. For a government, for other companies, or both.
Listed: not a single legitimate reason to distrust them.
What do you think of their audits?
Apple also promised they were squeaky clean with your data. Snowden came along and shattered this illusion.
Even “independent” audits are not universally trust worthy.
Yes, but then at that point of distrust, we’d just be better living a caveman life without internet. Gotta draw the line somewhere!
Or I can use a self hosted SearXNG instance and not be a caveman? Or I can use the tool, but not glaze it online spreading it to others as if trust was a given?
And how do we know you’re not a Russian bot account?
You sound too squeaky clean….
You’re totally free to distrust me. I’m not sure how you think this would be a gotcha.
If I asked for your personal data and you gave it to me, I’d think you’re naive.
