Just today a number of my searches had me wondering whether AI slop generators were generating articles and suitably titled websites in response to the searches I was making on my search engine.

I don’t know how they’d do that without being able to snatch search terms I make to my search engine (DDG, with its AI features disabled), just don’t find it plausible that anyone is bothering to generate hundreds of sites on extremely narrow aspects of obscure topics, even if semi-automated.

And they often have the same question worded slightly differently three or four times in the first paragraph.

Increasingly find that search engines ignore instructions to filter by date or site, which coupled with ignoring all operands will kill off their utility entirely.

Well, it worked initially, then more often than not my searches produced no results or confusing error messages.

Experimented a lot with the SearxNG settings, and also with my browser and firewall settings in case there was some issue there, and eventually gave up.

I was unable to find information online about the issues I experienced, in part because I had no idea how to describe them in order to find help.

Think I tried it in three different browsers, over the course of a month or so, but primarily in Firefox.

Have tried out SearxNG without self-hosting, via different instances, but had to abandon it as it is way, way beyond my mental capabilities to get it to work.

I doubt I could manage to self-host, having looked into Docker for some other matter.

Using Mojeek currently, which isn’t great but not too terrible.

Yup.

DuckDuckGo’s search engine introduced AI assist and an AI chat as opt-out features, which it repeatedly re-enables at random, with no ability to disable it permanently, even though we’ve been able for years to set a bookmarklet to make all our other DDG settings persist.

Users are very unhappy, with requests for a way to permanently disable AI features ignored, receiving only patronising responses from DDG.

No matter, DDG’s utility for searching has deteriorated these past years so severely, even relative to the deterioration we’ve seen with many other options, that I wonder will it survive.

It is always unfortunate when a recommended privacy tool shifts away from privacy, but several doing so all at once is alarming.

Aye.

Have developed the habit of unblocking telemetry every so often, so that the settings I value show up as in use by someone.