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Comment by alganet | Hacker News Reader

The normal DuckDuckGo also has their own AI assistant.

You need to use plain HTML DuckDuckGo in order to get rid of it.

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html

If you don't use Private Browsing (or the equivalent) or otherwise clear your browsing cache, DuckDuckGo's AI assistant can be disabled by:

- clicking the little gear to the right of the search types (near "Assist" and "Duck.ai")

- Click on "Manage" for AI Features

- Setting "Duck.ai" to Off

- Setting "Assist" to Never

To the right of the features above, I saw one can save their settings with a password, to the "cloud". This seems to be that you can enter this password when using DuckDuckGo elsewhere for your settings to be set again (or in Private sessions, though you'd have to re-enter the password on a new session).

We also offer https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ which is just regular DuckDuckGo with AI features turned off.

I have to pay you my respect. I've been watching DDG pretty much since day #1 and against all odds you've managed to both stay the course (which pretty much everybody claimed you would not) and steadily improve on it. It's one of the most impressive projects in this space, which many have tried and eventually gave up on (or compromised their ethics). Thank you.

Thanks! I really appreciate your comment.

Thank you! I have no issues with occasional AI responses but nevertheless it's great to have a choice!

Are there any other subdomains worth knowing? I was only aware of the Lite version so far.

There is noai, html, and lite (and even lighter variant of html).

I had no idea about this subdomain. Had you not shown up to this thread, how would a DDG user have known about this?

If you disable Assist from the inline dialogue, there is a message that comes up about it, but I agree we need to show that in more places, like in the settings screen.

Maybe include it in the Assist response window? I know you can disable Assist from the settings icon there, but also including a way to avoid AI entirely where it's most relevant also seems like a reasonable approach.

Now, the first few times you interact with Assist, a dialogue automatically appears asking you how much you want it to show.

Most people have been trained to just ignore that stuff.

How does one get the combined effects of multiple subdomains? For example, no AI, safe browsing, html, lite, as proposed by others?

That is very cool, thanks!

Or you could turn it off in the settings, which is much easier: https://duckduckgo.com/settings#aifeatures

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