Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 168 posts

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

#121

Post by ai-x »

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?

Remember the scene in "You got mail" where there are bunch of people who protest against big retailer and support the local bookstore but at the end of the day, they have no extra sales.

All these anti-Google, anti-facebook, anti-Instagram, anti-OpenAI, anti-Claude stories are exactly that. Provide copium and feel good for a handful of people for a few days.

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

#122

Post by capitainenemo »

superkuh wrote: post #24

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.

Huh. Didn't know there were 2 non-JS interfaces. I get redirected to https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ (which is also 10 per page). I do appreciate that DDG has it at all. Google blocks all non-JS searches these days.

I've never noticed the challenge, but then, I don't think I've ever clicked 20 pages into the search results either. Usually if I've clicked on a couple of pages I feel it's time to refine my query..

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

#123

Post by AlecSchueler »

ai-x wrote: post #121
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?

Remember the scene in "You got mail" where there are bunch of people who protest against big retailer and support the local bookstore but at the end of the day, they have no extra sales. All these anti-Google, anti-facebook, anti-Instagram, anti-OpenAI, anti-Claude stories are exactly that. Provide copium and feel good for a handful of people for a few days.

But the reality is that DDG has had an influx of users, and You've Got Mail was a work of fiction.

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

#124

Post by jhack »

the__alchemist wrote: post #54
cassianoleal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bluesky is insufferable. Literally any issue in any program is labelled "#vibecoded" by these clearly genius-level engineers who've never shipped a bug.

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

#125

Post by dfxm12 »

Fogest wrote: post #10

To be honest, I didn't find DuckDuckGo's AI on the top of their search to be very good anyway compared to the one Google has. However can't say I have cared much as typically if I am searching I don't want an AI response, otherwise I'd just go straight to an AI chat interface in the first place.

Me too. Hopefully future iterations of this service will remove or at least penalize ai generated websites, especially blogspam.

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

#126

Post by [deleted] »

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)

[deleted]

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

#127

Post by james2doyle »

Maybe I’m a wierdo but I actually like the Brave version of their Search + AI solution: https://search.brave.com/ask

After switching between Perplexity, Phind, and a couple others, it seems like the best balance for my use.

You can always just use the regular Brave search. It does seem to include an AI summary by default, but you can turn that off: https://search.brave.com/settings#:~:text=Make%20AI%2Dpowere...

I find it is grounded in facts (based on the results) more and doesn’t typically make stuff up. I am usually using it for things I am more well versed in (web dev) so I have a baseline knowledge to draw from.

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

#128

Post by Fogest »

dfxm12 wrote: post #125
Fogest wrote: post #10

To be honest, I didn't find DuckDuckGo's AI on the top of their search to be very good anyway compared to the one Google has. However can't say I have cared much as typically if I am searching I don't want an AI response, otherwise I'd just go straight to an AI chat interface in the first place.

Me too. Hopefully future iterations of this service will remove or at least penalize ai generated websites, especially blogspam.

Yeah that is actually I think the biggest issue with search in general right now is that I feel like 50% or more of the search results I am getting are AI generated fake sites. Even worse is that sometimes they are malicious and pretending to be what you might be searching for. I personally would much rather companies spend money on AI tools that help filter out this kind of crap, versus investing it into AI summaries at the top of the search. Overtime the summaries are just going to end up being based on data crawled from AI generated slop sites.

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

#129

Post by WolfeReader »

gchamonlive wrote: post #111
WolfeReader wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why in general? Because if you don't read the article, you run a strong risk of reacting to things that the article didn't actually say. See OP for a good example. Why this OP specifically? Because he is strongly reacting to the article's claim that "Ai is not the default" ... which is not stated or implied by the article he's replying to. The article is a useful bulletin that DDG has a "no AI" function, previously a…

It's just that people have different understanding of the world and assuming something is self evident is dangerous. For instance the problem here is the apparent disconnection between the comment and the article, but maybe it's just that the connection isn't evident to you . Take this response to a comment of mine for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48144461 . I've read the article and someone thought…

I don't owe the benefit of the doubt to a comment that says "this is just marketing" and "are people this stupid?". If OP is going to make dismissive, vitriolic comments like that, he should probably make sure that the article is actually saying anything like what he claims.

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

#130

Post by Fogest »

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #62
Fogest wrote: post #10

To be honest, I didn't find DuckDuckGo's AI on the top of their search to be very good anyway compared to the one Google has. However can't say I have cared much as typically if I am searching I don't want an AI response, otherwise I'd just go straight to an AI chat interface in the first place.

The Google one is personalized to use language and sources that you'd prefer. They're building an individual response for each person that is most suited to trick that person into clicking on their ads. For some people they dont care, but I myself dont want a digital clone of me tricking me into buying things. Salesman have for a long time teaching new salesman to use NLP tricks like matching and mirroring to convinc…

Yeah for sure. When I was using Kagi for example, I had to be far more specific especially if I am looking for things that are more local such as local businesses. I personally don't mind having to do this and I knew when signing up for something like Kagi that it wasn't going to be able to use information it has tracked about me to give me these kinds of "better" search results. So at the end of the day there is a trade-off that has to be made for privacy. Sometimes I do throw the `!g` bang in there if I want to be redirected to Google in order to get those more localized/personal results and knowing I am trading off some privacy.
Post reply on HN