DDG has a noAI portal that filters out AI images and doesn’t bother you with summations and things. it’s available at noai.duckduckgo.com and you can add it as a separate search engine to Firefox thusly.
DDG has a noAI portal that filters out AI images and doesn’t bother you with summations and things. it’s available at noai.duckduckgo.com and you can add it as a separate search engine to Firefox thusly.
I’m going to say something spicy here, but for me personally, I’ve found DuckDuckGo’s AI search summaries to be quite useful. Not for the actual AI summary text, but for the links they give, which are often better than the normal search results.
That being said, I could easily do without them.
A spicier take still: I personally have found DDG’s AI summaries useful even without further clicking. When one’s query is purely technical (vs politics or whatever), I don’t see any need to click dutifully.
Same for me with Perplexity.
Me too, but fair warning to double check on the links if it is something niche. Perplexity can not always be trusted to interpret limited information properly. It does a pretty good job on enough for me to use it though.
As I said elsewhere, the problem is in fact that search engine providers deliberately make their search results worse to push AI usage. This keeps the user entirely under their control and at the same time hurts the websites the AI training data was stolen from, because no one will bother to visit them any more. I’m not saying DDG does this, but they get their search results from other search engines where this is the case.
Is that a documented fact that they make old search worse to promote AI?
The fact that search engine results gotten worse itself and that this was done deliberately is well documented, and it is documented that Google and others have a history of trying to prevent users from clicking through to the actual websites and keeping them in their ecosystem. They have developed similar things in the past, like Google AMP.
I have no definitive proof that they worsen their search results for promoting AI, but if you look at this thing there are a lot of indicators for this to be true. Controlling what the user will see and where they will go next is vital for these companies and it’s the reason why content algorithms exist and why they are creating “bubbles” to put individual users into. It’s all about controlling the content the user will see. Now if you think about it and ask yourself if having an AI box dominating the upper half of the screen giving you answers that the search results below don’t is beneficial to these goals, the answer is most likely yes.
Also you can do your own experiments which will make it pretty evident. Search for a few more obscure search terms. Use niche topics that will not yield a lot of results. In most cases the AI will nail it and the search results below won’t. Even if you use advanced search techniques it is really difficult to get the information that the AI gave you as a regular search result. But when you ask the AI for a source you get a website which has the content you were looking for.
Now the question is: Why is the AI that much better than the regular search engine? If you have used Google in the past, only a few years ago, it was perfectly possible to get those results through regular search, which is now bordering on being impossible. Odd, isn’t it? It seems like they gave AI a much bigger index to work with than their own search engine.
Would love to read more about this if you or anyone has links
I have been wondering wether this is the case too. The search results on Google have really worsened the last few years, in my experience.
IMO that is a case of an unintended but welcome outcome for those companies
Google for sure did, you can read about it here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Idk if DDG did similar or if they did, if it is documented.
Note that, reading the article & a recent follow up, it was moreso serving more ads that drove them to make results worse, rather than AI: the article was published in 2024, and refers to events starting in 2019. GPT2 got released around that time, way before ChatGPT (2022).
Still 100% enshittification though.
Wow that’s a really insightful article, I doubt a lot of people know about this, Thanks!
While we’re at it, I also like that they give me an AI chat that is ostensibly more private than alternatives for the times it’s useful. And choosing different models is great.
I agree. I don’t trust the AI at all, but the links are quick and easy to use.
You can also set them to only show up when you click a button for them, which I always preferred.
Unfortunately not possible when using temporary containers
Temporary Containers Plus is a Firefox extension that puts all containerless tabs in temporary throwaway containers that get deleted soon after they become unused
It does, however, interfere with saving site settings because cookies won’t be saved.
This is perfect for my use case. I mostly think AI results are a waste of energy, but having them on demand can be useful.