DuckDuckGo should apply this lesson to their search engine!

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

I maintain that this should be the default behavior and the AI be opt-in

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.

DuckDuckGo has taken a clear stance on generative AI and other LLM-based tools, having asked users whether they wanted AI results fully integrated into search. An overwhelming majority said no, which is why the company now keeps AI content and interactions confined to a separate page.

This is what I get when I run a DuckDuckGo search in a private window. Sure doesn’t look separate to me.

Click “show never” or “on demand”

which is far from

the company now keeps AI content and interactions confined to a separate page.

noai.duckduckgo.com

they are definitely not confining AI functions to that page.

Given the url, it would seem to be quite the opposite.

yes that’s what I meant. what was your point?

mine is that despite claiming AI functionality is confined to a separate page, it is enabled by default on their main search site

kagi.com

I know its not DDG but default behavior is no AI overview (which you can still ger by explicitly asking for it if that’s what you need).

Yep. Usually an AI overview will just piss me off, but sometimes I do want it. In those cases, I add a question mark to the end of my query. It’s easy.

(example: “could you find me 3 different premium pull-down attic ladders and summarize what makes them nice?” because I don’t want to wade through marketing until I have to. Also, y’all, feel free to brag about your attic ladder. Mine is aluminum, feels like it’s going to attack me when I pull it down, and has inadequate hand/guard rail for something next to an open stairway. The scissor-style ones look nice.)

Ironically they do resemble perv shades.

They are all based on the same designs from like the 40s.

Being a pervert was hilarious until 2016

Beautiful, chefs kiss *

Didn’t read but should advertise as smart glasses sarcastically

I took the time to read the fine print, and these glasses appear to sense the vector of reflected light and specifically filter out waves with a horizontal orientation. The processimg power needed to do this will mean these must have an uncomfortably large battery or require frequent charging.

Polarization is kind of just magic. Which means these sunglasses might actually require mana points to use.

Fortunately it’s that awe inspiring battery technology where the power can be remotely stored and transmitted over millions of kilometers.

Quantum Power™©

I think it uses nanotechnology to just do it automatically.

Think it will require age verification?

Sunglasses dont do ‘absolitely nothing’.

People will constantly cry about the fact that I’m not putting on sunscreen while they’re going out in the sun without sunglasses.

People are dumb. I could technically remove a cancerous mole myself, I can’t remove eye cancer myself. Or somehow unfuck my eyes once they’re damaged.

If you think you're able to just remove skin cancer yourself, sorry but holy shit you're delusional.

technically

If I cut the arm that has the cancerous mole on it off - the skin cancer is gone. Granted, I was thinking more carving it out - you know, the way doctors do.

No. Do not do this. This is how you end up with terrible cancer that spreads. Doctors don’t just start hacking away to carve out skin cancer. You are absolutely delusional or terribly misinformed like the person above said if you think you can just cut off the cancer at home.

It quite literally is just hacking away you moron - my uncle has had hundreds of cancerous moles removed, they literally cut away more flesh than just the mole to ensure the cancer doesn’t spread.

Fucks sake

This is you:

I could technically remove a cancerous mole myself.

Since you’re the smart one, and we’re all morons, I’ll defer to your expertise. You should totally just hack away at your suspected cancerous moles at home. Probably you should use a dull kitchen knife or whatever. Good luck!

And you’re sitting here suggesting that I’m wrong about cutting your fucking arm off to get rid of cancer.

Of course I’m not advocating that someone back alley ripper docs the fucking cancer out you trog

Yeah we’ve already established that you’re the super duper smartest person ever. But you can’t back out now! Especially after you cut all those moles off your Uncle Lindsey’s butthole or whatever. You gotta get in that kitchen, pull out that knife, and technically cut off all those cancer moles. We won’t try to talk you out of it again I swear!

This guy you’re replying to is literally an absolute joke. Something is wrong with him I think

look up „metastasis“ if your cancer does this, you cant just remove an visible „mole“. Its a bad idea anyway but with metastasis its impossible

Dump people compensate with smart devices, they buy garbage trying to look smart.

Any one with a smartwatch looks dumber to me…

Can’t spell dumb for someone calling people dumb

Plot twist: goverment applied vaccines through the air and this is government’s survey on side effects.

I have a pair of prescription, self darkening lenses in cheap frames that look like the DDG ones, and no one has ever given me a second glance when I wear them in public places.

And ?

On an only semi-related note, photochromics are super dope and are definitely one of those technologies that make me feel like I’m living in the cool future we were promised.

While we’re talking about glasses technology, it seems like oil resistant coatings have finally gotten really good. My eyebrows are pretty oily and would smear on the top middle corners of my glasses all the time. But my latest pair just has a tiny bit of smudging there. I can press them against my face and wiggle my eyebrows right against them and it’s still only a bit smudged.

I thought that too for a while, but the shine has worn off of photochromics for me because all the ones I’ve owned have lasted grand total of about a year or in some cases less before they’ve worn out and no longer darken in the sun. The longest lasting chunk of the stuff I’ve ever managed to own was the visor on my motorcycle helmet, a Bell Qualifier DLX, but that also had the tradeoff of never actually getting dark enough to be useful so I had to wear normal sunglasses under it anyway which really rather defeats the purpose.

Instead when I’m feeling particularly cyberpunk these days I bust out my old pair of CTRL shades. They have their own inherent drawback though, in that even though I managed to score my pair free through my job at the time I’m still afraid to do anything heavy duty while wearing them lest I break the damn things. That’s because it’d cost me $300 for another pair.

That’s totally fair. Ive never owned a pair since there isnt really a reason if you dont need prescription glasses so I didnt realize they could wear out so fast, but the concept and material science is really cool nonetheless

People give me second looks, but that’s more because they’re sexy AF.

my socks also lack video recording or generative AI integration. perhaps i should sell them to eBay

They’ll go for more if you don’t wash them before selling.

Not if he sells the water he used to wash it as sock juice

But of course it does something. It blocks light, and let a man stare at boobs discreetly.

Hey, don’t be sexist… They also let women stare at boobs discreetly

You’re right. Women also like to stare at boobs.

Another use case I failed to mention: staring at butts.

The most wild feature about my sunglasses are that they have air pockets in the arms so they float if dropped in water.

I got one of those foam things that stick to the arms and make it float

Mine have interchangeable lenses, so I can swap them out for yellow or clear lenses if the light isn’t so bright but I still want UV protection, protection from magpies, or something to block the wind in my eyes.

That’s cool. Way cooler if they were polarized though.

Did you read the link?

No - at least I’m homest. By your reply I guess they are. Thanks.

Well not nothing. They do block the sun.

so can litery anything else

Clear glass. A ziplock bag. Wind. Thoughts and prayers. Sunblock - dammit.

Will these work for the upcoming eclipse?

I assume you are joking but just in case you aren’t: no, regular sunglasses are never sufficient for protecting your eyes from an eclipse.

i like my gold-mirrored clipons too much to drift

Normalizing glasses that look like Facebook perv glasses isn’t something I would want.

Glasses that have cameras should require red led to be on at all times by law (when turned on).

I believe the Facebook glasses do have this.

The problem is just that the light is rather easy for an end-user to remove. And that it may be too dim to clearly see in brighter situations.

I worn glasses that made me look like a pervert long before it was a trend

This pervert erasure will not stand, man!

😎