DuckDuckGo’s building AI-generated answers into its search engine | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo’s building AI-generated answers into its search engine

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66 pointsevo_978 comments

I think I've gotten to the point I'm ready to drop DuckDuckGo. Recently it's been mixing in region-based results in to my search engine. These are results that have nothing to do with my search query, and go against the reason I started using DDG in the first place: non-personalized results and not leaking private information (such as location) to the search service.

Seems like their old core values are no longer their primary concern. I don't know of any decent alternatives yet, but I'll be keeping an eye out, and am happy to get any suggestions people have.

Those are the ads. That's their revenue source.

They aren't labeled ads, and it seems incredibly strange that my local chamber of commerce would be buying ads for random lyrics from a song I forgot the name of.

I feel similarly. The other problem I'm experiencing: extremely slow search page loads, both on desktop and Android Firefox. For now, I've been able to work around it with DDG's HTML site (thank god this exists!), but if I want image search I'm still stuck using the main site.

There are a few small private search engines out there, I've been meaning to try out a few. This space is absolutely ready for new ideas, hopefully we'll see some decent options crop up in the next year or two.

I have the same problem. I thought it was me.. The HTML Page sadly has no image search I could find.

Check out Kagi. It's paid, but I like it a lot.

Looking at them and their focus on AI, and especially stuff like the "Summarize Page" feature, I'm quite against them! We don't need more search engines that take traffic away from websites.

I understand that I can simply not use those features, but I don't want to support a search engine that does not support its search results.

Good luck finding anything that doesn't try to incorporate AI.

At least with Kagi you can toggle off the AI stuff. In my settings, either I already toggled it off and forgot or it's off by default.

You've always got my search engine. It runs on a literal potato that can't do AI. But it also runs on a literal potato and the results are fairly limited as a result...

Paying by query count is such an annoying monetization scheme that I refuse to even bother giving it a shot. Do they really expect me to penny pinch my search queries? I don't want anything like that in my headspace.

I dropped DDG maybe a year ago. The problem is, I constantly am searching about esoteric things. Obscure, less known media. Content creators with small followings. Niche topics that aren't very popular. Or even just very small, specific sub-groups of a very popular thing.

For that, DDG just doesn't do well. I found myself having to do the !g command so frequently to get what I wanted that it wasn't worth it anymore.

This is the main argument I see against DDG, but I've never seen it be true. The only purpose of !g for me has been when I want Google maps specifically. For anything else it's just as good as the other search options. I think it would be more accurate to say that none of them seem to be great these days but not that this is a DDG issue.

In my experience, Google is substantially better for my searches than DDG. Google isn't perfect, but it's pretty close to what I need. I wish that wasn't true though, I would vastly prefer DDG.

I search for a lot of really obscure stuff, but I haven't used !g for anything for a couple of years now.

Unfortunately, for non-obscure stuff I add g too often for my liking (but not too often to drop DDG yet), have made conscious decision to try to not do that, but always went back.

tip: you can add a custom search engine and use g instead of !g, more convenient

This makes me a little uncomfortable. Google started integrating AI into their search engine in 2015 and it's my opinion that in the same timeline their search results have progressively gotten worse. There may not be a connection, but I know that I preferred the results I used to get, and sort of blame their downturn on AI. A search engine is an index, so I find it really important that it functions like one instead of a recommendation engine.

Have you seen the record revenues they made in the last 2 years? [1] It seems to be working very well for what they care about most.

[1] https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/266206/googles-annual-glo...

I guess it depends on the interest of the parties concerned.

You the consumer would like to have results more closely related to what you wanted.

Google (or other company) wants to bring you a result that's more likely to generate revenue for them.

For myself, I recall being able to get a Wikipedia in the first or second result. Now it's a bunch of sponsored/ad results and a bunch of shitty bloated websites and no Wikipedia like I wanted. (Of course specifing Wiki in the search fixes this)

Ugh just stop. This is a fad and it's not well enough tested for it to be getting pushed out this quickly. I don't want AI in every facet of my life, we're giving up too much control too quickly.

How else are they supposed to test without a large number of people using it?

How is DuckDuckGo supposed to compete without?

How is this not an improvement to search?

(presumably whilst still respecting people's privacy)

Why would you consider a result set that contained AI results useful or legitimate? LLM sure looks to be the end stage of the enshitification of the internet.

> LLM sure looks to be the end stage of the enshitification of the internet.

The web is not the internet. Join us! https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Well if it is learning from my search habits and its results reflect more accurately what I wanted compared to traditional search then I would say that's useful. Not to mention the niceness of more natural language you can use to query.

You're handing the work of sifting through data and determining reliable resources off to an artificial middle man. That's a whole lot of trust you have there.

It's only an improvement if you assume that intelligence is very good at what it does and/or has your best interests in mind.

How so?

Search already does that (sifting through data and giving me its best results) so you're already trusting a middle man here.

If AI can get me results that I can tell are better than older search algorithms results then that's a win. Either way I'm still having to verify sources.

Maybe... that's assuming it's telling you where it's sourcing all that info and you can go prove that it's reliable.

Chat-GPT doesn't do that from what I've seen.

How will you tell it's better???

This is DuckDuckGo though. Here it's apparently just bringing you the relevant information from a Wikipedia page and showing you that.

Personally this a great feature for me.

In my mind, AI for search is one where there's an attempt to answer (with source to back that answer) and also provide an efficient list of relevant links to other sites that it believes is related or part of what I was searching for. There's nothing really 'hidden' more so than before in my opinion.

The test for AI is will users find results better and faster than before. Which so far seems to be yes as far as I am aware.

However I understand where you are coming from with the Chat-GPT interface just spitting out a result and completely obviscating where it came from.

Yes, but it's sifting through data in the background and making the decision for you whether you ought to be able to see certain things. Traditional search engine do that sort of but not to the extent AI does. AI will make the decision for you on whether something meets the criteria of being a "good source".

So it is the extent of what you 'don't see' or 'don't understand' going on that you have an issue with rather than the new technology/software.

I've noticed, and others have here as well, that Google results have progressively gotten worse. I don't see a lot of what they are doing in the background either (some of it is already AI) but I know for certain that my results have increasly become more revenue generating than what I wanted (without adding more specific search terms). So AI isn't what exactly has made Search bad.

I suggest spending more time learning how something works. I've found in my experience it helps alleviate the feeling of anxiety I would get when I didn't know what was going on.

DuckDckGo (DDG) seems like they're being transparent on how they're implementing this and how it's going to be used. You're still being given a list of websites and not just raw answer output so I don't see how it's hiding anything more than is already.

As long as they continue to do that and it produces noticable improvement in results it's a win in my book.

Edit Here is what they're doing:

https://spreadprivacy.com/duckassist-launch/

> How is this not an improvement to search?

Depends on what you want from searching, I think. If what you want is a list of links to other sites talking about what you're looking for, ChatGPT makes searching worse, in my opinion.

This weekend I used ChatGPT to:

1. Help select a data structure for a very specific use-case given certain constraints, generate a first pass of the code, and help debug it.

2. Recommend a recipe for the exact set of ingredients I had on hand. (It was for muffins, and they were delicious)

3. Diagnose and fix an issue on my stovetop that’s plagued me for months.

In some of these cases it dramatically reduced the time I would have spent searching/researching from hours to a minute. Search is great for some use-cases and not great for others. I’m glad DDG is supporting more use-cases with an eye toward privacy.

I'm glad that it's helped you, but there's a big difference between an individual proactively using AI and a service forcing it on its users.

I guess I don’t understand why you feel they’re “forcing it on users.”

Just don’t look at the results it generates or use ublock origin to filter the AI response off the page?

I don't think it's so much about DDG specifically but of all the services now rushing to introduce AI into their flow.

On the flip side I tried to get chatgpt to help me generate a pandoc metadata.yaml file to convert a bunch of markdown files into a single docx file.

I tried to keep it simple to start with so I could incrementally build it up so started with wanting double line spacing and the content of each markdown fike to start on a different page.

I gave up in the end and had to do the research myself as chatgpt was massively hallucinating and throwing random stuff in I didn't even ask for.

> throwing random stuff in I didn't even ask for

Sounds like ChatGPT has officially become a professional software engineer.

Turbo3.5 or 4? 4 is substantially better at code generation. To the point where I would never try to use T3.5 to generate code.

I feel like we should all start specifying in our comments which model we are talking about when we are talking about ChatGPT.

You had the knowledge to discern whether the info given to you was legitimate. The average user doesn't have that. What if I need to look into something that I have zero knowledge about? When I get a list of sources, I can look through those sources and at least partially determine whether they're reliable. If an AI just spits an answer out, do I always just trust it?

Search engines are getting bad enough about throwing crap information at me. I think AI will just increase that. I prefer that I have the power to sift through the sources. I'm not willing to hand that completely off to AI.

I see your point, but is it much different than googling and getting a site in the result with wrong information or advice?

It's different in that you'll probably look at more than one source if you're searching the web. The sites with bad info become pretty obvious when you've looked at more than a few different sites on the topic.

(Edit: This was in response to a deleted comment that claimed nobody would be forced to use LLMs)

> Websites that we can stop using any time we want

This is naive. Soon (within the next 5-10 years) it will not be possible to contact any large consumer companies for support without "speaking" to an AI bot first. Next, banking and financial services will replace their customer-facing roles. Finally, frontline government and medical service will be automated.

I don't think it's hyperbolic to predict that within the next 15 years, it will not be possible for you to get help with your cable bill, your airline tickets, your credit card, your driver's license, or your knee injury without interacting with some kind of AI support agent. Maybe you will be able to beg for a human the same way you can mash 0 on the keypad today, but the wait times will be long.

Who knows? Maybe the AI bots will be great and this will be a newly utopian era. But you will not get a choice, and you will not be able to "stop using" any of these AI system.

I doubt it was chatGPT but this happened to me the past weekend. It took me 6 hours on the phone with Comcast to get a simple billing error fixed because their system kept 'selecting me' to try out their new automated support system.

In all fairness, Comcast is the worst. I don't think their customer support will ever be anything but nightmarish regardless of whether or not they use automated "agents".

> your cable bill, your airline tickets, your credit card, your driver's license, or your knee injury without interacting with some kind of AI support agent.

For all of those things except the credit card, I can physically go to an office and talk to a real human being. I doubt that will stop being possible in the next couple of decades. I hope, anyway, because that's my fallback plan.

It sounds like DDG will make this something you have to click on a special button to get. That means it's easy to ignore. That's a good thing because I have negative interest in using AI for web searching.

I'm interested to see how this scales cost effectively, at all the search engines.

DuckDuckGo is less profitable I think than Google/Bing, and are paying for API access. Bing appears to be running the models directly on hardware rather than paying for marked-up API access, but it's still expensive. Google seems to be in a good place with their custom chips, but who knows. It'll all be fascinating to see evolve.

What are the custom chips that Google has?

This feels like it’s not on my radar.

Not GP, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit

These have been huge for things like Home Assistant and object detection in real time video processing via Frigate and Google Coral TPU Accelerator. It sure cut down on the false positives I was getting for detecting cars and people coming up my driveway and not deer or my dog walking across it. They're only about $100 and come in M.2 and USB form factors.

https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate

It's the Tensor chips as another commenter mentioned. My feeling is that these should be cheaper in the long run than A100s from Nvidia because you're not paying another company's profit margin, plus they should be able to be more specialised and therefore less wasteful of compute, and therefore cheaper.

I guess the counter to this is that if Google is developing them for itself only, then there's fewer economies of scale on the development process.

Having just dropped Kagi in favor of DDG, does anyone have a recommendation for a search engine taking a stand against AI-generated content?

Kagi does take a (responsible?) stand:

https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy

I'm only interested in products that wholly refuse to use LLMs.

The problem with AI-generated answers is that they are bullshit delivered with confidence and authority.

Like almost everything in the internet, not sure what "AI" is changing here.

If I'm reading something about React written by Dan Abramov or something about Rust by David Tolnay, I can trust that I'm getting solid information from a trusted source.

With AI sometimes the information can be as high quality as those trusted sources, and sometimes it can be complete garbage.

If I'm not knowledgeable in the topic I'm researching, how can I tell the difference?

Brave is also injecting "summaries" into its search results

they're harmless I guess...but also mostly irrelevant to what I am searching for most of the time

So they think that's their path to success, versus fixing the facepalm lack of search operators. That makes me so sad

I haven’t used the feature yet, but Kagi has recently added AI into its functionality as well.

Oh i'd be really curious how that performs compared to Phind.

See the benchmarks here:

https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#aitest

Interesting to see Bard so high up on the list!

Well shoot, think imma have to sign up to Kagi for a while. Seems a good trial, just like GPT.

I already wanted to support them, additional features just sweetens the deal.

I like that it's inline with the search results. That's something I don't like about Bing's chat, you either have to search the web or ask chat. It's not as seamless.

Can I ask the chat to "please only show me the results that the search engine doesn't want me to see, the stuff that isn't from advertising partners"? I'm going to create a browser plugin to appends that phrase to every search request.

Isn't it better to use AI to passively rank pages i.e. make sure the pages shown in search results actually contain answers to what I'm searching for.

Didn't bing change its index service pricing to be prohibitively expensive for ai powered search engines?

I stopped caring about DDG once they announced search blacklisting about the Ukraine war. Once a search engine crosses that line its over, why wouldn't they apply it to anything else they feel similarly about? You're not gonna compete with google by trying to become them.

I thought DDG was just a thing wrapper around Bing. Has that changed?

Are they still downranking non-mainstream news?

"AI answers" are a unique opportunity to have actual private "search" so to speak, since you can use LLMs on your own device. I know they are too expensive to be practical for that on phones for now, but hopefully with time Duckduckgo would be able to at least have an option for offline or self hosted mode.

Would be a selling point for their app IMO.

As long as there's an off switch, this doesn't bother me.

How do you know that without having seen it?

How do I know what? That it won't bother me?

search.brave.com already has this feature.

March 8th. This feature was rolled back.

no more duckduckgo for me. Their non stop youtube advertising has annoyed me to hell

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