I’d say most people don’t really care

Most people are idiots.

As mostly a person I’m offended!

As an idiot, I am too!

This comment is unnecessarily dismissive and unhelpful.

If people don’t care, then they won’t care if it’s gone either. And that’s the better option.

If enough people were that bothered about a box with an AI overview, it wouldn’t be there. Simple as that. The thing is that the overview turns out to be helpful in some cases, despite what the haters think.

No, the act of a company shoving something bad down people’s throats does not prove it’s what they wanted. You should know this.

We have polls that have calculated people’s sentiment. They are sick of AI .

Ok, if people hate AI so much, you’ll see it being gone soon. No company would want to spend money keeping an useless feature, principally DDG, which is no monopoly.

Also, that poll is about Americans, I don’t give a shit what Americans think.

if people hate AI so much, you’ll see it being gone soon

That’s not how capitalism works. If you genuinely believe in the Invisible Hand Of The Market, you shouldn’t.

And you should know better: just days ago , you were telling people capitalism, not AI, was the real villain, which makes your tone here come across as trollish.

This isn’t really about the invisible hand of the market, I was talking about a single company. It costs money to keep those models up, which DDG itself hosts. If we were taking about Google, for example, then I could see the argument since it is a monopoly and my line of reasoning wouldn’t work.

I’m not trying to be troll as you accuse, I’m just trying to think from different perspectives and have something less sensitive to ideology.

We don’t find out the truth by agreeing with everything that panders to our beliefs.

lol.

if you think people aren’t sick of this trash, you’re leading a very sheltered life and need to get outside and speak with humans, not just ask your llm what to think.

If you think people deeply hate AI as you seem to do, maybe you should take your own advice, because the humans I talk with in a daily basis on my job are completely ok with it.

genuinely doubt you’re being truthful unless you work at one of the hyperscalers.

I know people working on model design who are growing to despise the entire thing.

Recently, my mom killed one of her plants, because she searched for something to use as organic fertilizer and the ai summary suggested to add coffee grounds mixed with water daily. She realized it was a fake information and isn’t trusting anything from internet searchers anymore. I wonder if at some point it will happen to most non-tech people, and search usage will go down heavily.

Coffee grounds can be helpful to add to fertilizer, but you need more than just coffee grounds: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11241280/

This being partially right is probably exactly how it ended up in the training data. But AI is too dumb to understand which parts are relevant/important.

wrong.

lol

here’s two links to give you an idea where the AI shit is going:

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-data-center-fort-wayne-indiana-wetlands

https://www.404media.co/city-that-arrested-person-for-clapping-at-data-center-meeting-moves-to-virtual-townhalls-for-public-safety/

Exactly my thoughts.

DuckDuckGo (plus AI) enjoys default search engine status on a lot of browsers, and many of them make it difficult to set a custom one (like NoAI). Especially mobile browsers, and apparently even Safari makes it a pain.

(Edited to clarify what I meant by default)

Settings > Search > Search Engine > DuckDuckGo

(Firefox) Settings > Search > Default Search engine > Add search engine or select one of the offered ones

Idk about Chrome and the other Chrorium based ones but should be as simple, if not, then you should first think about using a better browser

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.

Its wrong though. Its wrong so fucking often. There’s no way to fix that. I stopped using ddg because of this. Pandering to right wing idiots does not necessarily mean being smart, that’s thatcherite Nazi coddling lies.

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.

how is summary at the top of page different from first result

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.

The acceptable inaccurate result rate is 0%. I think that’s unachievable by LLM tech.

No search will ever give you the correct answer 100% of the time so I dont know why you’d draw such a dumb line in the sand.

I mean unless you dont use search engines, don’t use libraries, don’t talk to humans.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thats not what I’m arguing. I’m saying most people dont care enough either way and based off research and polling ive seen that most people do use the features. So if most people use them and only a tiny fraction wants them gone you should keep them default and give those people a toggle.

When I’m saying 175k out of 100m I’m pointing out that its a tiny % of the user base. The people who were engaged enough to vote in that poll were the anti AI people. It was posted to all the anti AI subreddits and twitter feeds. It was a big call to action to try and prove no one wants it.

Its obviously where search is heading which is why ddg mentions in their blogs that they are working heavily on AI features. They have always been receptive to users so unlike google so they do give users the option to disable. If they had data that most were disabling we’d see that be the default.

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.

Yes that is a good sample size but its biased by the people weighing in caring most about the issue. If it was 175000 users sampled randomly from the DDG user base then yes it would be a good predictor but it wasnt.

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.

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.

AI is the future of search

Thought terminating cliches are the future of online discourse.

The user experience of AI search is way to good

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Its not a thought terminating cliche if you didnt cut the next word out

“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.

Ai search results are ass

Asses are cute sometimes. They can also be great for sex!

Neither virtue possessed by “ai” search results.

Almost every report i’ve seen shows over 50% of people using AI for search

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”?

At least with Google, you can type and respond directly with the AI summary.

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. pewresearch.org/…/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-…

So its fair to say I was wrong and its not over 50% but its close to 50%.

Then these people aren’t using DDG anyway, so why should DDG be trying to appeal to them?

How do you know? Im sure 1% do

Their AI is terrible

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:

rudevulture.com/journalist-explains-why-google-de…

And when I say deskilled, I didn’t mean in the work space, but inability to source information themselves…

over 50% of people using AI for search

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 for info This is not including viewing of AI summaries as AI search.

Having a search algorithm be AI based and having an LLM summary of “the web” is two completely different things.

DDG provides both because its what users expect from a search engine now.

Almost every report i’ve seen shows over 50% of people using AI for search

Because people don’t know that they can turn it off, or they don’t know how to turn it off and it doesn’t bother them enough to find out how. If it was opt-in, that statistic would probably be 5% use AI for search.

This stat is people who use llm chatbots for search. It excludes summaries. I think that had 60% saying they did read the summaries 10% saying not sure and rest saying they didnt.

Folks can configure this as their homepage, search engine, etc.

I would argue a good 99% of what we experience in life should be opt-in and yet here we are. Use of AI, companies getting our data, etc is all opt-out meanwhile organ donation is opt-in. Wtf.

When you use the site for the first time and search something where AI overview is available, it shows a toggle for how often you want to see it, with “sometimes” as middle ground being the default. Without showing that a feature exists, it’s hard to decide if you want to use it or not. And since peoples opinion about it seems pretty spit, I think that is pretty valid.

Or would you rather have a cookie-popup like choice box pop up every time you use the service without cookies enabled asking you for your preference? Because that would annoy me very much.