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

41–50 of 168 posts

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

#41

Post by unfitted2545 »

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.

Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism touches on this concept, where there's a constantly shifting opposition to the market that itself becomes engulfed in its own market, to be advertised.

So for example all the productivity/digital detox channels and videos are themselves a consumer demand to be watched on YouTube, on phones. And now we have anti-AI products marking themselves higher for a feature that didn't previously exist. It's like the tree of capital gets split at every turn.

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

#42

Post by elzbardico »

miyoji wrote: post #14
cassianoleal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 our new giant insect overlords" is, IMHO, the operative meme here.

Others are just addicted, the cycle of fast interaction and reward in coding agents is not very different from gambling or crack cocaine.

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

#43

Post by TimByte »

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 on macOS, take a look at Orion from the team behind Kagi Search. It runs on WebKit, is really light on battery usage, doesn't come bundled with crypto stuff or AI agents, and still supports Chrome and Firefox extensions natively

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

#44

Post by organsnyder »

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 use ChatGPT on occasion for certain tasks. But when I'm doing a web search, I want a web search without AI.

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

#45

Post by shevy-java »

So, Google killing off google search, is probably the number #1 reason for DuckDuckGo growing - that and how AI ruins everything now.

Unfortunately, whenever I used DuckDuckGo, the search results were also crap - and the User Interface was crap too. For some reason these web-searches suck, from A to Z, starting at the UI, but more importantly showing search "results" that are really qualitatively not good or inclusive. We already HAD good results - Google search used to be usable, then Google killed it off deliberately. Some inspiration Google appears to have taken from youtube, where you can search for "xyz", and it shows you "abc" instead after a while, which is horrible but not totally horrible as you may just watch another video. But for exact text search, copying that was stupid. Google ruined its search engine deliberately over several years, hoping that people will never notice it. And now we should use this crap AI garbage "search"? That is a privatized web. I refuse to help transition to private actors controlling the www. For similar reasons I do not use AMP and recommend everyone to not fall for the trap Google puts at you.

Either way, someone can hopefully tell the DuckDuckGo team to offer alternatives that do not suck in their search engine. (Qwant also sucks, by the way - they just copy/pasted Google's search UI; perhaps some people want it, I don't. I want oldschool search. Simple. Stay simple. Don't clutter the UI. Don't add garbage. Don't lie to the user. And so forth.)

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

#46

Post by cassianoleal »

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)

A lot of people who are fed up with AI use ChatGPT. Being fed up with something doesn't necessarily mean they start pretending it doesn't exist.

Furthermore, where did that number come from? What does "active" mean? What does "user" mean?

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

#47

Post by adregan »

My issue with DDG AI result is that sometimes I would accidentally hit the "more" button to expand the result and it would begin a painfully slow crawl of text that pushed the results I was actually interested in further and further down the page. It was usually preferable to refresh rather than wait. So this is a welcome change.

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

#48

Post by john_strinlai »

organsnyder wrote: post #44
john_strinlai wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use ChatGPT on occasion for certain tasks. But when I'm doing a web search, I want a web search without AI.

same!

my comment is not in support of google's ai search. or ai in general.

just pushing back on "ai is not popular", because it is obviously popular by any reasonable metric.

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

#50

Post by malfist »

TimByte wrote: post #29

I think a lot of people aren't actually against AI itself. Personally I just want to choose when I need a chatbot and when I want a normal list of links. Over the last few years, that line has started getting pretty blurry

> Over the last few years, that line has started getting pretty blurry

Is that because every page you land on these days is just AI slop?

Post reply on HN