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

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

#21

Post by gwbas1c »

Arubis wrote: post #6
gattac_janitor wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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".

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

#22

Post by 7952 »

cassianoleal wrote: post #12
jerf wrote: post #7

"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.

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.

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

#23

Post by king_zee »

d_silin wrote: post #3

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?

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

#24

Post by superkuh »

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.

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

#26

Post by miyoji »

john_strinlai wrote: post #17
cassianoleal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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)

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.

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

#27

Post by cryo32 »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #20
cassianoleal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#30

Post by Xirdus »

d_silin wrote: post #3

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 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.
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