alt Hacker NewsDuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms
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To be honest, I didn't find DuckDuckGo's AI on the top of their search to be very good anyway compared to the one Google has. However can't say I have cared much as typically if I am searching I don't want an AI response, otherwise I'd just go straight to an AI chat interface in the first place.
"Wait, we're getting an influx of new users, and they actively don't want us to run the most expensive part of our search results page?"
Where can I find such accommodating customers myself?
You have to ask: Why is Google pushing the AI results? You would think that this would impact their ad revenue. Since Google is fundamentally an ad company, this deserves a closer look.
My suspicion - for which I have no proof - is this: With search results, Google marks the ads. The marking has gotten ever more subtle over the years, but it's there. If you want to avoid clicking on ads, you can. With AI, Google wants to integrate ads seamlessly into the results. If you search for widgets, and Acme Corp. has paid Google enough, the AI summary will praise the virtues of Acme's widgets. And the user will have no idea that this is paid placement, instead of a summary of product reviews, etc..
I think a lot of people aren't actually against AI itself. Personally I just want to choose when I need a chatbot and when I want a normal list of links. Over the last few years, that line has started getting pretty blurry
I've weirdly found that I like the Google AI mode in specific cases, and I find that the hybrid is the worst of the two worlds. There are some cases where I don't know exactly what I'm looking for and I want the AI to curate results. In other cases, I know what I'm looking for and I want to read the OG source.
The AI popup is the worst and will hallucinate answers from Reddit comments. I specifically had it ask me a nonsense question which was literally just someone's Reddit comment suggesting a follow-on topic B to the search topic A. The AI mode will _sometimes_ be useful enough to prompt into doing the search and summarization for me and get me just enough info and some links to continue the work myself.
DDG has been my daily driver for more than a decade now and I could not be more pleased.
Better privacy, good results, no drama, first search engine to include bangs, and its free!
Kagi is still by far the best results for me, particularly for engineering content and worth every dollar.
DuckDuckGo results are even more frustrating than the currently-terrible version of Google for finding good information IMO.
I've been using DDG for years and it's at least as good as Google for most general use. I still keep it set as the default search engine.
For some context sensitive searches where words overlap with more common topics I have a Kagi subscription.
Unfortunately DDG is still horrible for non-English results. As are most "smaller" search engines. I rotate through them every now and then to try. Is there a meta search engine that uses country specific engines depending on searches anyone can recommend?
My issue with DDG AI result is that sometimes I would accidentally hit the "more" button to expand the result and it would begin a painfully slow crawl of text that pushed the results I was actually interested in further and further down the page. It was usually preferable to refresh rather than wait. So this is a welcome change.
Ironic to me as the only DDG thing I use anymore is their duck.ai service
I switched to DDG search three months ago, and unfortunately it's much inferior to Google. Maybe I've subconsciously optimized my queries for Google these past 20 years and need to rethink how to query using DDG, though.
Been using DDG now for years since I noticed a few years back already that its search results were at least equal, if not superior, to G00$le.
Since google got as bad as bing, it doesn't matter anymore and ddg is fine (afaik still the main source). This is just a plus.
I would be way happier with the old site-specific excepts and no AI on the search results, but the AI page still a click away like it's today.
DDG today has two search options, IMO, both could get some improvement.
> Since then, traffic to DuckDuckGo has been booming. Last week, the company noted that web visits to its no-AI search page were up nearly 30% week-over-week, and its U.S. app installs were also up 18.1% week-over-week, with U.S. iOS app installs peaking at 69.9% week-over-week growth.
Of course there are no absolute numbers or scale. This is just an advertisement for DuckDuckGo. It's gross that previously respected tech publications run this kind of slop for clicks
I personally switched to DDG months ago when Google opted me into AI search against my will.
"&udm=14" still works on google.
I switched to duckduckgo last week and i am really loving it. I tried their browser but I was getting a lot of 'this browswer is no longer supported messages'. I think I will try brave next.
The logical business opportunity in the current LLM-boom is to create a bunch of AI-less services and products, and then charge money to access them.
Think of premium branding analogy: masses get cheap AI slop, wealthy get high quality human-curated and human-created produce. Like organic vs regular food.
Anyone with experience know how DuckDuckGo compares to Kagi in terms of quality of search results?
Related:
DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
DDG would be a lot better if lite.duckduckgo.com didn't automatically block anyone who looks deeper than 200 search results as a bot and then force a JS only challenge on the lite page (that crashes old browsers). I think this false positive could be solved by DDG lite returning more than 10 results per page.
So, Google killing off google search, is probably the number #1 reason for DuckDuckGo growing - that and how AI ruins everything now.
Unfortunately, whenever I used DuckDuckGo, the search results were also crap - and the User Interface was crap too. For some reason these web-searches suck, from A to Z, starting at the UI, but more importantly showing search "results" that are really qualitatively not good or inclusive. We already HAD good results - Google search used to be usable, then Google killed it off deliberately. Some inspiration Google appears to have taken from youtube, where you can search for "xyz", and it shows you "abc" instead after a while, which is horrible but not totally horrible as you may just watch another video. But for exact text search, copying that was stupid. Google ruined its search engine deliberately over several years, hoping that people will never notice it. And now we should use this crap AI garbage "search"? That is a privatized web. I refuse to help transition to private actors controlling the www. For similar reasons I do not use AMP and recommend everyone to not fall for the trap Google puts at you.
Either way, someone can hopefully tell the DuckDuckGo team to offer alternatives that do not suck in their search engine. (Qwant also sucks, by the way - they just copy/pasted Google's search UI; perhaps some people want it, I don't. I want oldschool search. Simple. Stay simple. Don't clutter the UI. Don't add garbage. Don't lie to the user. And so forth.)
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I use duckduckgo but...
This is just marketing.
You get an "Auto-Generated" "Search Assist" summary at the top of most searches. So... they're using AI, you can just hide the summary. So, the "Ai is not the default" claim is bullshit, and I'm now less trusting of duckduckgo if they're willing to pretend their 'no AI' angle is substantial. 30% increase on the noai.duckduckgo.com subdomain. I wonder what % that is of their total traffic? Can I guess <5%?
Techcrunch mentions this in the last paragraph.
Nice marketing I guess? If techcrunch would lead with pointing out this is just marketing and they're totally an AI company, this article would count as journalism.
Honest question: Are people this stupid? Are techcrunch reporters this credulous and uncritical? I am genuinely completely on board with replacing this kind of 'journalism' with AI summaries of PR releases rather than gild them with fading gleam of actual journalism.
I've been building information extraction and discourse analysis tools for exactly this reason: most 'journalism' is lower effort than a the AI summaries they're complaining about.