They are choosing to abstain from using artificial intelligence for environmental, ethical and personal reasons. Maybe they have a point, writes Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi
You know what I was thinking about the big summary at the top and completely forgot about the summaries in the result descriptions. But I’m not sure if that’s DDG doing it, Bing (who they use as a backend), or the sites itself since I only see it on results from reddit and such.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over a decade, the results are fine, and !bangs are extremely useful for piping queries directly to specific sites, !w for wikipedia, !aw for archwiki, etc. The Duck.ai function is a recent addition, and it can be easily disabled if you don’t want it. By default it doesn’t usually pop up by itself. You can also use lite.duckduckgo.com for a much leaner search and absolutely no AI.
I was trying to use it for a long time, but the results are never fine for me. The situation when I search for something specific, the duck shows me nothing, and the google shows me exactly what I need is far too often for me to completely switch.
Granted, I don’t keep cookies, I use all the adblocks possible, and I disabled google’s LLM bullshit, otherwise google is borderline unusable.
Unfortunately, it’s not better and also shows slop
You can at least turn off its built-in summaries. But some filtering to detect AI generated articles would be nice.
You can ask it to turn off the summaries. It still shows them but you can ask.
You know what I was thinking about the big summary at the top and completely forgot about the summaries in the result descriptions. But I’m not sure if that’s DDG doing it, Bing (who they use as a backend), or the sites itself since I only see it on results from reddit and such.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over a decade, the results are fine, and !bangs are extremely useful for piping queries directly to specific sites, !w for wikipedia, !aw for archwiki, etc. The Duck.ai function is a recent addition, and it can be easily disabled if you don’t want it. By default it doesn’t usually pop up by itself. You can also use lite.duckduckgo.com for a much leaner search and absolutely no AI.
Just switched to noai.duckduckgo.com. Thanks stranger!
Ah, I was unaware of that shortcut, thanks for the heads up, and you’re welcome! 🦆
ddg is great :)
I was trying to use it for a long time, but the results are never fine for me. The situation when I search for something specific, the duck shows me nothing, and the google shows me exactly what I need is far too often for me to completely switch.
Granted, I don’t keep cookies, I use all the adblocks possible, and I disabled google’s LLM bullshit, otherwise google is borderline unusable.
!g to pipe to Google if you must, I rarely need to.
Personally when I use it, unless it’s something trivial, I always end up doing exactly that.