DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms

techcrunch.com

309 pointsjaredwiener152 comments

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.

The Google one is personalized to use language and sources that you'd prefer. They're building an individual response for each person that is most suited to trick that person into clicking on their ads. For some people they dont care, but I myself dont want a digital clone of me tricking me into buying things.

Salesman have for a long time teaching new salesman to use NLP tricks like matching and mirroring to convince people you're relatable and trustworthy. Google is doing this with all the data they have on you.

Yeah for sure. When I was using Kagi for example, I had to be far more specific especially if I am looking for things that are more local such as local businesses. I personally don't mind having to do this and I knew when signing up for something like Kagi that it wasn't going to be able to use information it has tracked about me to give me these kinds of "better" search results. So at the end of the day there is a trade-off that has to be made for privacy. Sometimes I do throw the `!g` bang in there if I want to be redirected to Google in order to get those more localized/personal results and knowing I am trading off some privacy.

Biggest problem is that google has a near exclusive deal with reddit, so all other search engines have old reddit results [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033

Yeah that does make sense, though I have found the DDG AI to give me some pretty misleading, incorrect, or just completely off answers which prompted me to throw the !g on the search to see what the Google AI would have given. I'm sure this is overall because of there being more training data, however I do think that is a good reason to simply not bother with the DDG AI. If the AI is going to provide mediocre or wrong answers a lot, then it seems better to just not have it.

Unfortunately I have seen far too many people, especially less tech savvy ones rely pretty heavily on the AI summaries provided by the search engines. And I think it can be a bit dangerous to have these results be super unreliable in what they state. The Google one also isn't perfect, but I've at least found it's a bit more accurate. However I personally don't really care for either. As I mentioned in my OP if I already made the choice to use a search engine, it's likely because I don't care for an AI response as I could open up Claude/ChatGPT or whatever's interface and ask the question there if I just wanted AI.

I misunderstood the context. I have all the AI features turned off in DDG. I don't use search engine AI because none of them can afford a model that's worth using, due to scale. I only use paid AI services (including my on-and-off subscriptions to perplexity.ai).

To turn off AI features of DDG, top right pancake icon -> settings -> AI features -> off

The older the better imo, seems like a useful feature. If I come across a thread from 10-15 years ago, sure it might still be a bot, but to me it's less likely to be dead internet and automatically higher signal

Honestly my first thought too. My Frontpage is half obviously Ai written posts these days, filtering by a couple years back would be a good thing

Me too. Hopefully future iterations of this service will remove or at least penalize ai generated websites, especially blogspam.

Yeah that is actually I think the biggest issue with search in general right now is that I feel like 50% or more of the search results I am getting are AI generated fake sites. Even worse is that sometimes they are malicious and pretending to be what you might be searching for. I personally would much rather companies spend money on AI tools that help filter out this kind of crap, versus investing it into AI summaries at the top of the search. Overtime the summaries are just going to end up being based on data crawled from AI generated slop sites.

Yeah, most of my searches are for keywords I think/know are in the title or url or page body. When I search "thing wikipedia" I'm being lazy, but I don't want even more energy wasted by producing an "AI" summary I won't even read.

Maybe I’m a wierdo but I actually like the Brave version of their Search + AI solution: https://search.brave.com/ask

After switching between Perplexity, Phind, and a couple others, it seems like the best balance for my use.

You can always just use the regular Brave search. It does seem to include an AI summary by default, but you can turn that off: https://search.brave.com/settings#:~:text=Make%20AI%2Dpowere...

I find it is grounded in facts (based on the results) more and doesn’t typically make stuff up. I am usually using it for things I am more well versed in (web dev) so I have a baseline knowledge to draw from.

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!

"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?

Pretty much everywhere. AI is only popular with AI providers and delusional C-suites.

Hey, don't forget about all the programmers who are excited to help destroy their own livelihoods for no extra compensation.

I think that a lot of those overly enthusiastic engineer AI fanboys are just playing a rational game driven by their perception that AI is a effective substitute for them, and that the only way to survive the comming culling is by being seen on the market as something an AI thought leader.

Basically, signalling that they are going to be cooperative subjects for the enemy's occupation of the land.

"I, for one, welcome our new giant insect overlords" is, IMHO, the operative meme here.

Others are just addicted, the cycle of fast interaction and reward in coding agents is not very different from gambling or crack cocaine.

The rational game here is extremely straightforward, and even has big names like "prisoner's dilemma" behind it:

Unionize.

I like how everyone on HN feels entitled to a profession that hasn't even existed for 100 years and that is constantly changing. Talk about addiction.

Yes, I am addicted to food and shelter and to being able to work in the profession that I specialized in and spent years learning to do well. Without these things I would literally die.

When I was fresh out of college in my 20s I watched two engineers get fired in front of me. They were hired to be DBAs. When I finished rewriting the software into a proper mvc their entire job became redundant since anyone could now make the database edits needed from an admin webpage. And I was better at the DBA part of my full stack role than they were. This is no different.

People need to be independently rich, or be extremelly frugal to not care about the hypothetical obsolescence of their jobs.

What the fuck do you expect? That people just cheer a brave new world of diminishing salaries and disappearing jobs along with some vague promises that every thing will be alright?

Yes, I absolutely do expect computer programmers to cheer as the brave new world they helped create is ushered in.

How many people here got rich by automating away the jobs of others? I mean, what is this? Others are fair game, but programming is sacred? That's quite simply the peak of absurdity.

Every single step in this saga has actually created millions of jobs.

It's pretty funny seeing this play out in the HN comments because I never got any consideration before when I had to learn new frameworks and languages. But suddenly machine learning is the line one should not cross? Playing the world's smallest violin right now.

What industries and professions has software actually made extinct?

The result of most software has been "you do basically the same job except now you do it on a computer"

Computer used to be a job for a cadre of women who did math. That job went away when computers, the physical machine, got enough software that those women were no longer needed.

I think the prevailing mindset amongst developers who use LLMs is that actually LLMs are more of an effective augmentation of programming tools in the same way that an IDE is, and the marketing angle comes from perceived demand for that augmented skill set.

Many developers even seem to predict an increase in demand in the medium to long term as AI written systems increasingly begin to need human attention.

I think the hyper enthusiastic ones are more vocal, but there's a quieter and larger group who are somewhat more measured about it.

Pretty wild to see this in a technology forum. The whole idea of technology is to do more with less. It inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable. Have you ever wondered how many livelihoods computer programmers have destroyed? Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?

> The whole idea of technology is to do more with less. It inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable

I don't think either of these sentences is true.

> Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?

I didn't say anything about a moral line, I just said that there are a lot of programmers who are very excited to remove themselves from being employable. I didn't even say whether I thought that was good or bad!

>The whole idea of technology is to do more with less

No, that's not the whole idea of technology. Technology exists to, and this is a non-exhaustive list: fostering creativity, play, enabling autonomy and self sufficiency, connecting people to each other, collaboration, building skills and enhancing people's natural capacities. That's a smalls et of examples of what one could imagine technology to do.

Are these AI tools connecting people, genuinely enhancing their capacity to think, increasing or diminishing their creativity and self-sufficiency? The answer looks pretty obvious to me.

People who think technology is something to be used to "do more" and then discarded have no actual interest in technology as an object of study, or as a set of pro-social tools. That's not the mentality of a hacker. Why would it surprise you that people on a website called hackernews don't have the same attitude as a guy in an MBA class?

It absolutely is. Technology is what lets you farm more with less resources. Manufacture more with less materials. Get more things done in less time. Fostering creativity and play? Yeah, by getting more things done in less time, so as to free up that time for all the fun stuff you actually want to do. Of course, to others this "fun stuff" is just yet another inefficiency to be eliminated.

We might love technology and think it has intrinsic value, but the rest of the world could not care less. It's about maximizing profits and minimizing costs. That includes the costs of human labor. No hacker here thinks of the amazon mechanical turk employees that AI will certainly get rid of, for example. I bet the hackers here will be at their most self-satisfied when they finally manage to replace doctors.

So it is indeed pretty rich to read complaints on so called Hacker News about hacking itself being automated away by AI models. It's a very arrogant perspective. Did hackers think they were above this? Did they think they were irreplaceable? Hilarious.

chatgpt alone had like ~900 million weekly active users last i checked.

thats a lot of c-suites

(or the anti-ai crowd is more vocal than the occasional chatgpt user)

Theres a difference between users seeking out AI, and PMs cramming AI into previously existing products.

i obviously agree that those are two different things.

but its also obviously not true that "AI is only popular with AI providers and delusional C-suites.

That’s pretty much it. I have ai in my tracker, ai in my search engine, ai in my team chat, ai in the os (work computer),… I’ve never asked for it, but I bet I’m being counted as one of those users.

they have 50MM non-business subscribers, if that’s a better metric for you. and that’s just one ai company - not counting the others or local models.

i hate unsolicited ai in my software as much as the next guy. but it’s silly to claim ai isn’t popular just because you don’t like it.

anything else with 50MM subscribers would reasonably be called “popular”.

I've noticed a lot of weaselly statistics associated with AI adoption.

Company replaces phone support with AI chatbot, then says "Call center interactions dropped 80%! People must really love our AI bot," even though they were given no other choice.

AI features are popular in the sense that people are using it. I think the popularity lessens when asked if people want these features.

My point being that people who visit chatgpt.com/claude.com/etc by their own free will are not the same as people who now have to use AI summaries on Google because they are just showing up there and making the ten blue links harder to find.

I don't think you understand that there's a difference between a user who wants an AI chatbot and a user who wants to perform a web search, and even if they're the exact same user, they expect for a web search to operate like a web search and not like a chatbot.

I don't think anyone who works in product management at any company in 2026 understands this, so you're not alone.

my comment is literally only pushing back on the claim of "ai is not popular".

by any reasonable metric, ai is popular. that doesn't change just because you super-duper hate it.

your insistence that i dont understand something unrelated to the point of my comment is weird.

I use ChatGPT on occasion for certain tasks. But when I'm doing a web search, I want a web search without AI.

same!

my comment is not in support of google's ai search. or ai in general.

just pushing back on "ai is not popular", because it is obviously popular by any reasonable metric.

A lot of people who are fed up with AI use ChatGPT. Being fed up with something doesn't necessarily mean they start pretending it doesn't exist.

Furthermore, where did that number come from? What does "active" mean? What does "user" mean?

>Furthermore, where did that number come from? What does "active" mean? What does "user" mean?

https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/

weekly and monthly active users are common industry terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_users

Sure but how do those map to real people?

The only delusion here is your comment. Claude and ChatGPT are extremely popular across millions of active daily users.

You're not wrong. I'm forever cleaning up the turds they leave everywhere.

I started to find that the AI bit was the most useful part of Google Search. But the actual search results were terrible and now I use Kagi. I like being able to add a question mark and control what becomes AI and what doesn't. I use normal search like a Ctrl F for the internet and don't want it to be too clever.

My non-tech savvy mother started reading the stuff the Google Search AI answers to for some searches, and she's already fed up with it saying whatever. To her it doesn't matter that the "AI can make mistakes" because (in her own wording) "if it's faulty, don't answer".

There's a difference between "linking to a source that may be incorrect" and "you providing the text that's blatantly wrong", and Google seems too big to care about it.

Yeah. AI slop is lying to people. When I realised that I disabled it. Thankfully there are browser extensions that do that easily.

People call it hallucinating. I think it is lying. Google etc.. became a huge liar. All those AI slop companies are lying to the people now.

That difference can be pretty small when most of the web is also consumed by low effort automatically generated slop. You can't escape it. I know there is a good web out there, but the search engines refuse to give it to me. Probably their algorithm. preferring recent content over good content.

I suspect the only real answer is an economic one, Something like Kagi, where hopefully by paying for results you change from being the product to a customer and this is incentive enough for them to provide good results.

Google only cares when something gains traction (and thus potentially hurts its bottom line". For example, it was answering "How many p's in Google" with "There are two p's in Google"[1] for long enough for me to get non-technical family members making a joke out of it. Google fixed it, only for it then to briefly tell you there were no p's in 'Alphabet' either.

Those particular bits on nonsense seem to have been stopped for now, but let's not fall prey to Gell-Mann amnesia. The only problem Google has fixed is "our LLM was hurting our reputation in this specific case". They have not, and likely cannot, fix the underlying problem.

1. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/why-googles-ai-cant-spell-...

I fail to understand why people think LLMs working in tokens (and thus having a hard time counting letters) is such a huge gotcha. Ask it to write you a bash script that counts the amount of p's in a word you input it'll do it fine. Then ask it to write that script in C, JavaScript, Lua, and a few other languages. Then ask your family members to do the same. The gotcha can go both ways.

LLMs are directly marketed as not requiring understanding of how it works.

The PR is "Its magic!"

So people try to treat it like magic, and don't like when it detonates a fireball in a room that is too small.

Not requiring technical knowledge is the selling point. That it doesn't need you to think.

Questions like this are irrational though. Nobody wants to know how many of a type of letter are in a word. Ask it a real question from your real life that needs a real answer it's fairly magic at getting the correct answer. And if you don't think so at this point my guess is you simply haven't used it enough.

Counting letters in words is absolutely a real question. Its trivia!

Half our TV is made up of trivia, and being able to generate trivia answer/question pairs is something both TV, and pubs, will try to do.

Imagine seeing this as a jeapordy question. What is 2 Rs.

LLMs have some limitations same as humans. The limitations are very different between the two which is why LLMs are very useful to us. I personally can't write a perfectly functional fairly complex webpage in less than 30 seconds, but I can count letters. I'll let the LLM make the webpage and keep count of the letters for a trivia contest if needed.

Also get the latest version of chatgpt (extended thinking) to make you a 'tiptop 100% verified Trivia stack for (x TV show)' and you'll get better than what most pubs will come up with. I did this for the simpsons when someone said it couldn't be done because that sounded like something an LLM would be excellent at. Turns out I was right.

Because it proves they are not, in fact, intelligent and do not, in fact, have any understanding of what they are doing. It's really obvious what people think it's a huge gotcha: because it is.

Yeah, gonna be honest. I ridiculed people for it before, but now I use Google's AI a lot. I haven't used Google in over a decade otherwise and I still don't. I use Brave for search but Google's AI is better than anyone else's for what I do. You heard it guys, I was wrong. I admit it.

This is fascinating, contrarian viewpoints are rare, so can you elaborate?

Google's AI is solid, but a lot of its benefit comes from the fact that it hasn't been enshittified into the ground like their search. The plain incontrovertible benefit is that it has the potential to reduce clicks from the user - instead of sending the UX through clicking into sites and then back to the main search pane the information is immediately available. That click through ends up being expensive for three main reasons 1 - the site is sometimes potato though google "solved" this with amp, 2 - it takes a while to scroll to the site entry passed all the sponsored links (a problem google created for themselves) and 3 - paywalls and "Please subscribe to our newsletter" popups are legion, but while this was always a little bit of a problem, it is a much more pronounced problem due to 1, the insertion of amp that threatens financial ruin on being crawled by google.

So, at the end of the day Google's AI is better than ye olde Google Search, and ye olde Google Search is now very difficult to accomplish because of how much Google has poisoned the well. Kagi is excellent but most normal people can't stomach paying for search when there's a "free" alternative so your options are Google's AI, Google's Search or and alternative search - most normal folks don't realize non-Google search alternatives exist (outside like Bing) so Google's AI ends up capturing a lot of usage.

Google's search AI caused a panic in my household just several nights ago. We were looking up an issue with our pet and the very first thing my partner saw searching google was an AI answer saying you need to panic, this is an emergency, get your animal to an emergency room asap before they die. That of course kicked her into Oh Shit mode. But aside from that answer none of the actual search results either of us were finding backed up the AI.

We had to decide whether or not to drag our pet to an after hours emergency vet, with all the associated stress and cost, or ignore the AI result and go off everything else we were reading. It's one thing to dismiss AI answers that seem wrong when it's a domain I know well or the stakes are low, but this was not that type of scenario.

In the end we opted to ignore google's AI and fortunately it was absolutely the right call. So, thanks google.

I think that's foolish engagement with the technology though. Never panic, always double check. I don't take it as factual. It's just a statistical summary of something it read and it must always be treated as such. In your case, why not just ask 5 other AI's and take a poll?

> But the actual search results were terrible

I think it's reasonable to assume that Google artificially nerfed its search engine before they pushed so massively for AI.

Google search already had a huge quality slide before 2022.

AI was ever useful for searching stuff?

I find that those "AI summaries" google tends to use by default, are hallucinating liars. I stopped wasting my time with this AI slop spam in general. Any "human" still using AI and targeting me, gets perma-banned without any further discussion. I kind of need ublock origin for EVERYTHING. (Ublock origin is great, but I need this on every level, blocking AI slop spam, blocking Nate's donation-daemon nag-widget for KDE and so forth - ok, the last one is easy to disable, just patching out the part where Nate thinks it is ok to harass people, but for AI slop spam from external sites I need something more effective than ublock origin, kind of like an ublock colossal shield.)

I find it takes me more time... sometimes it has the answer, often it has pure bullshit. I need to verify everything that comes out of it myself before repeating at anyway.

If people are just naked copy-pasting that field... which, ugh, of course they are... they are doing themselves and others a disservice.

Anecdote: Most of the anti-AI sentiment I hear is from internet communities like BlueSky. I don't find this generalizable.

Bluesky is insufferable. Literally any issue in any program is labelled "#vibecoded" by these clearly genius-level engineers who've never shipped a bug.

Well, the AIs are supposed to find and fix the bugs too. So now what's our excuse?

There are quite a lot of anti-AI sentiments expressed here.

Seems like AI is the Ozempic of tech. IE token generation keeps soaring, yet if you ask any individual- many swear they aren't touching it.

You can find such accommodating customers if you listen to customers.

In most companies executives can bypass processes to make projects happen - when done well that allows long term investment to happen when the business case is too complex to reduce to an RoI - when done poorly you end up launching a lot of pet projects that have no market and never will. I feel uniquely positioned to have a good understanding of the maluses and benefits of authoritarian project creation from all three angles and the best solution I've seen is to let it happen but bring down the hammer if things get too absurd.

Remember the scene in "You got mail" where there are bunch of people who protest against big retailer and support the local bookstore but at the end of the day, they have no extra sales.

All these anti-Google, anti-facebook, anti-Instagram, anti-OpenAI, anti-Claude stories are exactly that. Provide copium and feel good for a handful of people for a few days.

But the reality is that DDG has had an influx of users, and You've Got Mail was a work of fiction.

Protesting against a suboptimal Nash equilibrium is not wrong, just because protesting is ineffective at changing the rules of the game.

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..

The simple answer is due to popular demand. I remember when people were doom-posting about how chat GPT was making google obsolete before Google introduced AI summaries, and no one has been saying that after Google introduced it.

There's an entirely valid concern about losing traffic to a competitor, but that doesn't make it logical to drop the old product some people still clearly prefer.

Like many companies, they seem strangely determined to force AI on customers, even if it costs them money.

The answer is simple.

“If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.” - Steve Jobs

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 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.

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

> Over the last few years, that line has started getting pretty blurry

Is that because every page you land on these days is just AI slop?

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.

Ddg is fine for me for English terms and non-work. For my search terms in other languages and work stuff, Google still can't be matched.

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?

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.

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.

Try kagi :)

I will say it's nice to have them actually honour keywords in searches that google has made harder and harder to discover and seems to ignore at will (inurl: site: etc)

The funniest one for me in google is +"foo" they decided people didn't actually mean it, so they changed it to +""foo"" - then when we all started doing that, they made the new secret "yes I really want that string" to be +"""foo"""

I dunno man. I switched years ago, and still to this day, when I get a bad set of results... I throw a g! on it, and still get shitty results.

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.

Can you give an example of what you're talking about? I just ran a search on an author I started reading, and the results had no AI and no obvious link to AI. Using Android and IronFox if that has an effect: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&origin=funnel_home_websi...

The no-ai page has no ai, no except, and no link that will bring your query to the ai prompt.

DDG probably won't want the first and the last there, but the second is valuable.

The normal page has a link to the ai, and used to have an ai except (IDK if it disappeared because I went to the no-ai page), but before that it used to have an except taken from the most relevant page by a set of rules.

The link to ai is useful, and the old except was very useful.

I previously posted about DDG search results (not personalized, but as geolocated as they can)

> DuckDuckGo search results, seem to be based on either crude geolocation or recent movies of similar names, bizarrely, when I search for specific technical terms. I have to qualify searches with multiple negations to get anything of interest to someone with more than high school education and interests.

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.

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.

The "More" button changes to a "Stop" button when clicked.

"&udm=14" still works on google.

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.

Huh. Didn't know there were 2 non-JS interfaces. I get redirected to https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ (which is also 10 per page). I do appreciate that DDG has it at all. Google blocks all non-JS searches these days.

I've never noticed the challenge, but then, I don't think I've ever clicked 20 pages into the search results either. Usually if I've clicked on a couple of pages I feel it's time to refine my query..

Anyone with experience know how DuckDuckGo compares to Kagi in terms of quality of search results?

I just stopped paying for Kagi as I personally found I stopped using search as much now that I am paying for an AI chatbot. So I have now switched to using DDG. I personally think Kagi did often have better results. I sometimes find myself adding the `!g` bang to my search so I can get the Google search results as sometimes DDG lets me down. I didn't do this much at all when I was using Kagi.

But this is also just my anecdotal experience and I haven't been on DDG for long yet since Kagi, so my perspective may not be proper yet.

It's very similar to kagi in that it only ever allows you to see 200 results per query.

I find DDG results to be lower quality than Kagi, have never liked Bing's index. I also frequently use the personalized site rankings feature in Kagi to strip out known junky sites

Far worse, in my experience. DDG was my first attempt to switch off Google, but the results just weren't very good and I frequently had to use the !g query option to get good results. With Kagi, I consistently get better results than Google.

I personally switched to DDG months ago when Google opted me into AI search against my will.

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.

This is sad and dystopian, why don't companies instead make AI optional in their products?

Among IT giants, Apple is the only such option.

This only works if your business is large enough that you and all your competitors aren't expected to have humans doing everything already, but small enough that going AI won't boost your valuation by much. My intuition is that the intersection is pretty much empty.

Who says "valuation"? I am talking about "profits", something that none of the the upcoming IPO debutantes have managed to achieve.

For the founders, IPO/merger is pure profit. They don't care what happens afterwards.

Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism touches on this concept, where there's a constantly shifting opposition to the market that itself becomes engulfed in its own market, to be advertised.

So for example all the productivity/digital detox channels and videos are themselves a consumer demand to be watched on YouTube, on phones. And now we have anti-AI products marking themselves higher for a feature that didn't previously exist. It's like the tree of capital gets split at every turn.

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.)

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.

I've been liking the Brave browser. The only thing I dislike is how many damn Cloudflare captcha's I have to go through all across the web. However in a way this may actually be a feature as I believe it shows that Brave's fingerprinting protections are actually effective. I didn't get these on other browsers as they were likely very easily fingerprinted.

I did have one site which told me I needed to use Chrome, Edge, or Firefox to use their site. Which kind of made me laugh considering the engine Brave uses. It was a really interactive JS heavy training site, so I guess they really wanted to be sure the browser was compatible to avoid support issues.

If you're looking for a no-AI vibe from your browser, you probably won't get it from Brave. Zen might be a better fit.

If you're just trying new browsers to see what's out there and clean, I've really liked Orion.

Thanks for the advice I will check them out.

Interesting. I hid the Ask Leo button eons ago when it showed up, so I never feel an "AI encroach."

That being said, I've used "Ask Leo" a handful of time, with mixed results. It's really good for "Give me the TLDR" or "Find the part of the page that talks about X".

If you're on macOS, take a look at Orion from the team behind Kagi Search. It runs on WebKit, is really light on battery usage, doesn't come bundled with crypto stuff or AI agents, and still supports Chrome and Firefox extensions natively

DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296649

I don't liked this AI answers in the beginning, but now they are to handy and help to not scroll and choose website by website.

Does DuckDuckGo support -not_wanted_word syntax? I tried to use it with -shop or -pharmacy and it still gave me unwanted results

It does: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax

But I guess sometimes it doesn't work??

> Please note: we are aware some of our advanced syntax isn't operating 100% correctly on all queries and are actively working on it. It is unfortunately a non-trivial issue given we get our private results from a variety of sources.

Ironic to me as the only DDG thing I use anymore is their duck.ai service

very impressived with no LLM results. If I want LLM, I don't need to use a search engine to engange with it. That's a different product.

> 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

DDG used to have a graph showing the number of queries they did daily. It was around 100 million searches a day before they removed it a few years back. They were receiving bad press at the time IIRC.

An educated guess is they're doing a similar number of searches today.

Oh, pity, seems they did kill that.

The traffic graph used to be at:

  https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

It was originally just a raw traffic graph, see <https://web.archive.org/web/20130711215117/https://duckduckg...>.

By late 2022 (18 November) it was a tabular presentation without the graph, and disappeared shortly afterward: <https://web.archive.org/web/20221118045948/https://duckduckg...>.

It's gone by 6 Dec 2022 (redirect to homepage): <https://web.archive.org/web/20221206080717/https://duckduckg...>

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