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DuckDuckGo AI Chat

duckduckgo.com

121–130 of 165 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo AI Chat

#121
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the time you aren't searching for "web pages". You are searching for answers, to get to which you'd have to dig through piles of web pages for an hour. Technology already exists to give you a direct answer in 95% of the time (with references), it just results in fewer ads shown to you, so search engines aren't interested in integrating it properly.

This you-know-better-than-me mindset is why all technology is converging to garbage. I can't speak for OP, but for me, you are half correct: I am indeed ultimately searching for answers, but I want the piles of web pages for an hour, and that is how I will find my answer. I don't like it when systems remove my agency by believing they can correctly predict my intent. (They can't.)

But there is no agency being removed here. You are being given more options by adding a button to chat if you so desire. It’s very small and unobtrusive

Re: DuckDuckGo AI Chat

#122

God damn it people. I just want to search the web. You aren't doing anything meaningful by giving me yet another fuzzy robot question machine. Just let me search the web. Queries in, web pages out.

This is an intermediary step to what will ultimately upend search: LLMs parsing web search results and giving you succinct results without you having to read them yourself.

If you haven't tried Arc Search's "Browse for Me" feature, you should. It isn't perfect yet, but I think it's clear that's the direction of search in the future.

Re: DuckDuckGo AI Chat

#123
post #15
post #3

"Welcome to DuckDuckGo AI Chat! This chat session is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo. All of your chats here are private, and are never stored by DuckDuckGo or used to train AI models." Wait, they are sent to OpenAI but they are also "private"? What am I missing here?

> Additionally, all metadata that contains personal information (for example, your IP address) is obfuscated from underlying model providers (for example, OpenAI, Anthropic). > In addition, we have agreements in place with all model providers that further limit how they can use data from these anonymous requests that includes not using Prompts and Outputs to develop or improve their models as well as deleting all inf…

Everyone has the same agreement. Duck duck go is grasping at straws here because their business model is completely crushed if they don't have a privacy upper hand or a competitive product. They will be forced into a pivot they can't succeed in.

Re: DuckDuckGo AI Chat

#124
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This (DuckDuckGo AI Chat) is currently separate from search results, and in any case we plan to offer settings to turn off any AI search integrations, similarly for how we do for instant answers and ads.

If you could stuff all webpages to a vector database and give us a nice RAG that just responds to questions about anything that could be found on Internet while generating links to the source, that would be even awesomer!

Working on that too. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40088329

Re: DuckDuckGo AI Chat

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't want to search the web. I have questions and I want answers- searching the web is an intermediate step, not the end solution. I have Question X and the answer isn't to surface "Blog Post Y"... it's the content of Blog Post Y I need, and only the subset of the content that answers my question, perhaps synthesized with the content of 5 other blog posts, a couple scientific papers and a recent press release…

You're not wrong in terms of the average user's intent (they mostly don't care about the source, they care about the content), but I see this as an ethical gray area when search engines effectively offer up all this content created by bloggers without the need of the user to visit the site itself. Phind tries to ameliorate this a bit by providing a set of links where the summarized data comes from, but most people li…

If you talk to a collegue and say "what should I use to do X", and they say "use FooX", because they read it in a book last year, is that unethical?

Most of the top results in search engines are terrible, mainly because of the SEO spam

We'll eventually reach that with AI of course, but for now we haven't.

Re: DuckDuckGo AI Chat

#126
post #18

Test query: Buy bulk pvc in cheyenne, wy FastGPT from kagi recommends national chains, a local plumbing supply store or two, and a specific facebook market page. All of these have hyperlinks. DDG just gives generic advice about national chains. I think the difference is that Kagi built a RAG model out of a web crawl.

It takes effort to integrate large language models with RAG or vector databases in an application rather than just slapping a chatbot on

Re: DuckDuckGo AI Chat

#127
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the time you aren't searching for "web pages". You are searching for answers, to get to which you'd have to dig through piles of web pages for an hour. Technology already exists to give you a direct answer in 95% of the time (with references), it just results in fewer ads shown to you, so search engines aren't interested in integrating it properly.

This you-know-better-than-me mindset is why all technology is converging to garbage. I can't speak for OP, but for me, you are half correct: I am indeed ultimately searching for answers, but I want the piles of web pages for an hour, and that is how I will find my answer. I don't like it when systems remove my agency by believing they can correctly predict my intent. (They can't.)

In a lot of cases today’s AI systems can easily predict your intent once they accumulate enough context about you. Not in all, but when they predict incorrectly it’s easy to correct them using natural language. And nobody is removing the option of digging in the pile, it’s just that I don’t see why anyone would want to, in most cases. I certainly don’t - I got better things to do with my time.

Re: DuckDuckGo AI Chat

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This you-know-better-than-me mindset is why all technology is converging to garbage. I can't speak for OP, but for me, you are half correct: I am indeed ultimately searching for answers, but I want the piles of web pages for an hour, and that is how I will find my answer. I don't like it when systems remove my agency by believing they can correctly predict my intent. (They can't.)

But there is no agency being removed here. You are being given more options by adding a button to chat if you so desire. It’s very small and unobtrusive

Ads, sponsoring and SEO spam were also very unobtrusive for a while. A few decades passed and we have to sift trough all the garbage to find anything relevant in our searches, it's very likely that search engines will push harder and harder for these AI assistants while making finding organic content and authoritative sources even harder, resulting in it being nearly impossible to do research by yourself rather then trough an AI that has god knows what bias and perhaps subtle ad driven bias into it.

Re: DuckDuckGo AI Chat

#129
post #123
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally, all metadata that contains personal information (for example, your IP address) is obfuscated from underlying model providers (for example, OpenAI, Anthropic). > In addition, we have agreements in place with all model providers that further limit how they can use data from these anonymous requests that includes not using Prompts and Outputs to develop or improve their models as well as deleting all inf…

Everyone has the same agreement. Duck duck go is grasping at straws here because their business model is completely crushed if they don't have a privacy upper hand or a competitive product. They will be forced into a pivot they can't succeed in.

>Everyone has the same agreement.

The same as the one I pasted? No, ChatGPT & others do not have the same agreement.

>They will be forced into a pivot they can't succeed in.

They seem like they've been doing alright for the past 15 years. I'm sure they can figure it out.

Re: DuckDuckGo AI Chat

#130

God damn it people. I just want to search the web. You aren't doing anything meaningful by giving me yet another fuzzy robot question machine. Just let me search the web. Queries in, web pages out.

I just don't want to search the web. I have questions and I want answers- searching the web is an intermediate step, not the end solution. I have Question X and the answer isn't to surface "Blog Post Y"... it's the content of Blog Post Y I need, and only the subset of the content that answers my question, perhaps synthesized with the content of 5 other blog posts, a couple scientific papers and a recent press release…

At this point, anybody here likely has had the privilege of being educated to prefer primary sources of information over secondary, tertiary, etc.

The indexing feature that search engines for years provided was a side-effect and benefit of the internet’s success.

There have always been challenges with this as it is not immediately clear what should be treated as “primary source” information — it takes time and skill — the user in this model is accountable for their own exploration and consumption of other peoples’ knowledge.

AI seems to be purposefully at odds with that. So, for me, the distrust and avoidance is well-placed.

That said, it’s a powerful tool that has a place in the world, but I hope it doesn’t come at a detriment to the colloquial understanding of what it means to “search the web”

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