Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

51–60 of 168 posts

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

#51
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, don't forget about all the programmers who are excited to help destroy their own livelihoods for no extra compensation.

I think that a lot of those overly enthusiastic engineer AI fanboys are just playing a rational game driven by their perception that AI is a effective substitute for them, and that the only way to survive the comming culling is by being seen on the market as something an AI thought leader. Basically, signalling that they are going to be cooperative subjects for the enemy's occupation of the land. "I, for one, welcome…

The rational game here is extremely straightforward, and even has big names like "prisoner's dilemma" behind it:

Unionize.

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

#52
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AI was ever useful for searching stuff?

I find that those "AI summaries" google tends to use by default, are hallucinating liars. I stopped wasting my time with this AI slop spam in general. Any "human" still using AI and targeting me, gets perma-banned without any further discussion. I kind of need ublock origin for EVERYTHING. (Ublock origin is great, but I need this on every level, blocking AI slop spam, blocking Nate's donation-daemon nag-widget for KDE and so forth - ok, the last one is easy to disable, just patching out the part where Nate thinks it is ok to harass people, but for AI slop spam from external sites I need something more effective than ublock origin, kind of like an ublock colossal shield.)

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

#54
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.

Anecdote: Most of the anti-AI sentiment I hear is from internet communities like BlueSky. I don't find this generalizable.

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

#57
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My non-tech savvy mother started reading the stuff the Google Search AI answers to for some searches, and she's already fed up with it saying whatever. To her it doesn't matter that the "AI can make mistakes" because (in her own wording) "if it's faulty, don't answer". There's a difference between "linking to a source that may be incorrect" and "you providing the text that's blatantly wrong", and Google seems too big…

Yeah. AI slop is lying to people. When I realised that I disabled it. Thankfully there are browser extensions that do that easily.

People call it hallucinating. I think it is lying. Google etc.. became a huge liar. All those AI slop companies are lying to the people now.

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

#59
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But the actual search results were terrible I think it's reasonable to assume that Google artificially nerfed its search engine before they pushed so massively for AI.

Google search already had a huge quality slide before 2022.
Post reply on HN