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this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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dont tell me what to do
On DDG is "Search Assist" the same thing as "Duck.ai?" Must confess that the former can be extremely useful sometimes, as long as I check its references.
Search assist is powered by AI.
I think the most notable feature of ddg ai is that its not invasive, and as someone else has said here it can actually be useful. AI is like everything, you need to decide when it can actually add value. If i'm searching for some linux command, ai is brilliant. If i'm doing reasearch i may use ai asking for all references and then i go and check the references using search feature. Sometimes i just use search.
I'll use duckai for fuzzy searches that are harder to find on modern search engines. Like anything I can't summarize in a few keywords, it's sometimes useful to have my query processed as language rather than keywords, basically. And modify the search with new expectations instead of different keywords.
It'll still be confidently incorrect, so I'm usually just using it to find a source faster than it'd take me to peruse a couple pages of search results. Occasionally it's been able to find some obscure shit that I otherwise would have given up on.
Being able to switch between different models is probably nice, although I haven't used it enough to really notice much of a difference.
You used to be able to consistently get great results with " and - and similar operators, but for like a decade now I often just can't find basic shit. I'd trade LLMs for peak search engines in a heartbeat. But since that's not gonna happen I'll use whichever tool works.
Ddg:
Ran https://voteyesornoai.com/ Where of 175k people, 90% said No AI
Offers noai.duckduckgo.com, presumably to cater to this 90% who don't want it.
Has AI first features in main product. Does not advertise noai much.
So...
- It's primary product goes against it's market research
- It's pushing AI, not promoting the alternative
- People keep promoting ddg for (2) despite (1)
Just seems weird.
I would recommend it just to avoid Google getting your data, but not because it's good or anti-AI, because those aren't true.
Iirc, they explained it on techlore talks like "it"s X% of those who responded in $site, while many qactual users prefer or don't oppose it", or smth of that nature. Also, it appears far less than on google even with constant cookie clearing
Additionally, people told me that DDG is in bed with Microsoft. If that's true, I guess Ecosia is hopefully better.
DDG is not in bed with microsoft. DDG uses Bing search index to show its search results alongside wikipedia and others they can.
Ecosia also uses Bing alongside its own search index. Except Mojeek, Qwant there are very few Independent search engines which don't use Bing or Google as its search index.
Oh, okay, whew. I wonder how SearXNG instances measure up...
I'm on ecosia, it also has AI as default, at least it's easy to turn off :/
why does a search engine that's marketed as eco-friendly use ai?
funny because i left duckduckgo since it's littered with AI shit now.
it's just a metasearch engine for bing anyway and there are about a million of those.
Noai.duckduckgo.com
But why do they not make this the default, and set ai.duckduckgo.com instead? Their real agenda is so obviously much more sinister that it's almost certainly better to just avoid altogether.
AI has got electrolytes. It's what clients crave
The problem isn't the LLM summary (easy to disable, what's the issue there?), but the SEO garbage in the results.
I want to like DDG (and tend to use it for "easy" searches), but what's the point if search atrophies?
Yep I've found this too. DDG has more SEO / AI slop search results than nearly any other search engine.
Yeah.
They must be thinking about getting away from Bing, or at least sanitizing the results somehow.
Part of the problem is that most of these privacy-protecting search engines are just the big search engines re-packaged; DuckDuckGo is Bing, and Startpage is Google. SearchXNG is just an aggregator, and so is Kagi. What we really need are some alternative engines that function as well as Google used to. I would be willing to pay for that, as relying on ads clearly doesn't work.
Mojeek and Qwant both have independent indexes but afaik have no paid teir
Unfortunately, neither is anywhere close to how good Google used to be, unless they've improved in leaps and bounds since I last tried them. I just want to be able to use boolean search terms again, and the fact that most modern search engines don't utilize them has me tearing my hair out.
I know Ecosia relies on Bing and Google but i have found their search results is the best of any of the "privacy" focused search engines
Qwant is not available in all places and limits its reach.
DuckDuckGo=Bing is a misnomer - DDG uses a basket of search indexes excluding google, and I believe Bing's percentage keeps shrinking (last I checked it was 15%)
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Didn't know that, I'll give Startpage a try since for me DDG sucks
I would like to direct the reader to Yacy. It's a free-software, self-hosted search-engine. Users have the option to peer with other users, creating a larger decentralised search engine.
Build it. Use it. Promote it. Finance it. Bupf it, for short. Build the future you want or piss and moan endlessly.
Cool! Would this be much different then say SearXNG? I know SearXNG relies on google, DDG etc to formulate its searches.
Neat. Reminds me of bitmagnet, which crawls BitTorrent's DHT to built a searchable index of torrents. It lacks a peer option though.
I ran it for an hour and calculated that it would use over 1TB/month of bandwidth, which is too much for my data cap :(
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DDG is almost all AI slop results now. Even worse than google.
AI bugs. Not features. Features are things people want.
I found Quant and DDG kinda sucky to be honest. I am experimenting with just having Tor open on my second screen with google. Might try Kagi at some point
I’ve been using kagi for quite some time and still happy with it.
Obviously not everyone will be willing to pay for search. But at least my data isn’t getting harvested.
+1
kagi has the best search results for me, results are often more relevant than Google's results. DDG has awful results and I often end up using !g on DDG because I don't get any relevant results.
I use mostly EU search engines without AI (Startpage, Metager, Mojeek......)
Been pretty happy with Qwant for the past month now. I do not really miss google. I set it as default on all my devises so I wouldn't forget to use it. Now I prefer it. So nice to not having the entire screen filled with AI, sponsored irrelevant links and 99% SEO spam. I feel qwant has more nuanced results.
Just "qwanted" a tech site name on mobile and the first two results were online gambling sites. Had to scroll to start seeing actual results. Not a great start.
30% growth is great, but that still means google controls, like, 90% of search in absolute numbers?
Has been for a long time.
Its in our language. People dont say "let me search on the Internet" they say "let me google it". Its going to take a while to move away from that
It’d be great if DDG’s search was actually better rather than just an alternative. I’ve been using DDG for years and I’m still having to use other search engines because DDG’s results aren’t good or it pulls a google and gives you the same results no matter how many different ways you query.
I switched because every time I tried to google something on my phone I got literally 10-15 captchas in a row and it was taking so long.
After trying basically every search engines (except Bing), I settled on duckduckgo.
I think people just don’t want every search to have AI included, it’s too much for some. Even though it’s useful sometimes, they are forcing it for almost every query, which is too much.
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