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Duckduckgo.com Ftw
I don’t.
Believe it or not, this was literally their motto. If you didn’t know, you’d never, ever think it was possible, right?
There was a time many tech companies were owned by idealists with fairly good intentions. Then they got rich, then they got greedy, and here we are.
You can absolutely debate whether their intentions were ever good, but that was their public face, at least. I think at least some of them meant it, personally, but maybe I’m still naive after all these years. I’m not the only one who took the statements at face value, though. Many employees at companies like Google have tried to stand for the old ideals and gotten shoved aside and/or fired.
Google doesn’t care about the profitability today. Just look at how they are integrating the AI into Maps, Android, Search and now those “Googlebooks”.
What they want is for you to die, and for a whole new generation that can’t interact with computers or information in any other way except a chatbot that can filter and control what they see. That’s when profits go through the roof.
Google released an API for the web results. People need to learn to use it.
You’re most welcome!
Google results have been ass for over a decade
Ehhh. I’ve found them to be more reliable for certain kinds of searches - government records and the like - than DDG, yahoo or bing.
As far as general websites and social media shit - yeah, it’s a hot mess.
Image search on bing is pretty decent right now, though there’s no guarantee how long that will last.
Google’s image searches (I primarily look for royalty-free graphics) are now keyed to the sites like shutterstock, dreamstime and adobe which leaves a lot to be desired.
People learned to game the system because the internet became literally every type of media to everyone, which of course made the arms race for eyeballs completely ruin it all because now everything is about money now. So those cute little blogs or recipe websites or people making videos just out of passion are absolutely drowned out by people desperately competing to make money. So now we are in a situation where we need filters to keep the crap out, but the companies who make money off the crap are preventing the filters from working until a new filter comes out and the cycle continues. AI is the new filter. Google wants to make their own filter, but make it flawed eventually so the crap can come back. It’s a vicious cycle of shit.
I was born to be evil. I’m a member of the Bar Sinister AND I was born on a dark Halloween night. My mother always told me I kept her up all night when I was born.
I never understood the previews, AI or otherwise. Why would a company pay you for placement when the preview steals your content and puts it above your ad?
Oh no, people are leaving us because the things we did well are getting worse!
PUT MORE AI IN IT!! TRIPLE DOWN!!! KISS THE CRUSTY ORANGE BROWN RING!
“Take away” search? We just making shit up now?
I was trying to figure out what they meant by that too….
I can still go to google.com and search for things. Yes, I get the ai junk on top, but the search results are still there. As far as I can tell, they didn’t “take away” search…
Trouble is, the web for which the PageRank algorithm was developed has long since died - Its highly decentralized, interlinked network of freely available information has been almost entirely been replaced by centralized, account-gated silos. Web search engines, in turn, have gotten progressively worse since long before LLMs had become computationally feasible.
much of that, both the centralization opposed to search and the search degradation to force more searches and serve more adds, like the removal of advanced search operators, was deliberate.
Eventually, yes. But many people don’t like hearing that the vast majority of them, the users, didn’t want to pay for the operating costs of a global search engine when the web got popular. Neither as customers of a company, nor via government spending as a public service, and definitely not through donations.
Hence, given the economic system we live in, the people running search engines had to find some means of funding, which turned out to be selling their users’ data and serving them ads. Once they had gone down that path the rest became more or less inevitable.
yeah free stuff without ads always enshittifies. people just aren’t willing to support that kind of thing.
I don’t think users would ever be in a position to cover the many hundreds of billions in revenue that Google found. Yeah, somebody has to pay the running costs, but there’s a place where the search engine could exist by just covering the running costs, without making infinite profit on top.
Yeah, somebody has to pay the running costs, but there’s a place where the search engine could exist by just covering the running costs, without making infinite profit on top.
People have tried and went out of business, because users predominantly do not want to pay for something they could (supposedly) get for free, doubly so if the paid version isn’t even significantly better. It sounds nice, but it hasn’t been true for the last 20 years or so.
The current funding model didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s the consequence of user behavior. Personally, I would e.g. support a search engine as a public service funded through EU budget, but I’m in a tiny minority with that opinion.
I grew up there. I remember very pointedly never having the option to pay for search. it wasn’t on my radar. shut your lying capitalist wind hole before you ruin your pants.
Personally, I would e.g. support a search engine as a public service funded through EU budget, but I’m in a tiny minority with that opinion.
I would get behind that, rather than pay some private company I do not trust. At least something EU-controlled, would be a bit more trusthworthy, than some shady business from who knows where and under what actual ownership. I do not trust company privacy policies at all anymore, all of them are lying as much as they can, since there are no real repercussions for it, except losing paying customers - which they will not lose, since they are able to lie as much as they want.
I don’t run into or use much AI, but Gemini seems to be the worst I encounter. It does pretty well at presenting facts and summations, but I’ve found it wrong enough times to be leary.
Gemini 4 Argon seems to be pretty damn good actually. But that’s not what you get in those search summaries, you get some smaller and possibly even quantized model because if they ran every single search on their frontier model, that would bankrupt them soon lol
Google’s got an image problem with their AI because of this. Unless you use Gemini on an Android phone (which not everyone even has), your primary way of encountering it is the quick and cheap model they use on the search page, whereas the other guys will serve you a decent model, but tell you to pay or piss off after a while
Google’s AI results are what finally got me to switch my default search engine to noai.duckduckgo.
You can set it with https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s&noai= in your web browser settings.
You can’t have % in a URL unless you have a hex octet after it. If you want to search for ‘%’, then you need to URL-encode the %.
URL-encoded
is%25. You might have seen before that URL-encoded space is%20(though underscore is often used for search queries).%25is URL encoding for, since all the encoding sequences start with % and then have a hexadecimal ASCII code after them, 25 being %.It is normal for it to be added and the browser just resolves %25 to % much like it would resolve %3F to ? for example
Google’s AI results are what finally got me to switch my default search engine to noai.duckduckgo.
Yeah I used to DDG for a good while then when they rolled out the ai (before the noai subdomain I guess), I decided that something I use 10 to 30 times in a day might actually be worth paying for and just went with a paid service that lets me turn all that off.
The important thing is to get off the goog, though. They’re too big for all our good now.
Running a local search aggregator that’s been great - degoog.
I ran ddg for a while it got crappy. I’ve since moved to kagi
Yeah DDG is really bad at filtering AI slop from the search results. You can turn the AI summaries off but 90% of the hits will often just be blogs written by ChatGPT
The idea is cool but I think I’ll pass.
Naturally not everyone can afford $5 a month for a superior product. Have you tried yahoo search?
That’s a lot of sass to throw in this economy. You don’t know anyone’s financial situation. Good for you that you can spare the $5 a month, but don’t be a jerk about it.
Maybe if they drank less cappuccinos they could afford it.
Pay for the product or be the product. I like having customizable search that works and isn’t filled with ads and features I don’t want. Or in the case of ddg, I like being able to search news and not ending up on MSN fucking constantly (because Bing)…
With that said, there’s also mojeek and searx, worth trying.
I just don’t trust anything that an AI Techbro Slopper company says or does. You mentioned their privacy policy? Well anybody who ships AI is sending your information to an AI Datacenter which inevitably ends up in the hands of both advertisers and fascists.
Of course if we’re comparing Kagi to other searches then they’re still better, and that has value, but it’s not for me.
You DO realize that all search queries that aren’t on your own self-hosted searxng or something go to a datacenter, right?
Of course your self-hosted searxng will still route queries to multiple different datacenters, so in reality you’re going to need your own index
That completely depends on what model you pick for your queries/chats; they have a little ratings system for the speed quality and privacy. There are also zero data retention policies for a lot of providers; I don’t trust that but obviously it is what it is. It’s also worth noting that those features are entirely opt in and customizable. Don’t want it? Don’t use it. You can turn off the widgets and disallow it entirely. You can also try to filter out a lot of AI slop and they also take community reports for slop sites and display AI and privacy risk badges in results.
A statistical model which could theoretically peak at 94% accuracy to a random human with infinite training will always be incompetence.
You are incompetent, slopper. You and Sam Altman are both idiots.
Um… Okay then. At least I know you’re not an LLM because an LLM would have written that properly…
And yes, Sam Altman is very much an idiot, along with all the other technofascists? I’m not quite sure how I’m getting lumped in with billionaires, but okay.
I do videcode some personal projects, and I do make use of LLMs to some limited extent professionally, but I’m also a perfectly cromulent developer specializing in resource constrained systems programming and have been since long before the transformers paper dropped… Not sure what that has to do with anything. I write modern C++ a hell of a lot better than frontier models and I explicitly mark my slop projects with a little “hallucinated slop” badge. If that makes me Satan to you, then okay, I guess; still not too sure how exactly my background and personal preferences have anything to do with a paid search engine… But you do you.
Half of the time you pay for the product and you’re stillthe product
Yeah those half suck. Anyway, I told myself I wouldn’t shill but Kagi’s privacy policy spells it out pretty clearly where they stand.
Could they one day turn around and start storing or selling user data? Yes. But they would face such a user backlash that it would end them. Their entire revenue is from subscriptions so without happy paying customers they’re cooked.
Try:
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25sThat has the 25 in it still BTW
I see what you’re doing, now! You’re pasting the address into your url bar? Lol, no, you’re supposed to add it as a search engine to your browser. In Waterfox/Firefox it would be in Settings > Additional Search Engines > Add Search Engine.
Afterwords, set it as the default, then you’ll be able to search in the URL bar as you would with any other default search engine.
deleted by creator
Kagi, ecosia, quant, ddg! Searxng for the nerds
same
It gets even better. The trillion dollar chatbot is not only killing the basis for search but its very own as well: All those content creators, small ones, large ones, commercial ones. They all are dying because of it, yet the chatbot needs constant feeding to stay alive, and will poison itself if fed on its own content. … This will be fun.
What you’re describing is cancer. Takes nutrition from neighbouring cells to grow infinitely ultimately destroying its own host. Kind of like AI and their constant need for water, energy, land and human data.
Not quite. Cancer can reproduce itself but it can’t sustain itself. AI cannot reproduce itself nor sustain itself. Even if AI bros would like to make it look as if they were not in control of their LLM while committing crimes, they are.
They ruined their search engine too
Also the internet.
And mobile apps. And smartphones. And browsers. And image formats. And the general concept of privacy…
They did that even before AI. Sponsored links and worse results, so people go to the dreaded page 2 more often, showing even more sponsored links and ads. And they say capitalism makes things run efficiently…
It wasn’t solely their fault, people gaming the ranking algorithms also did disastrous damage.
Because they wanted more clicks so they’d make more money from the ads served by… Google.
It was entirely their fault.
True, though it’s not like Google is/was the only company serving ads.
oh, there were two big pedophiles do Jeff EPs was actually fine and basically a good guy.
Not what they are arguing. :|
that’s not what your mom said.
you don’t understand! if everything only exists as byproducts of scams, we will get the best most efficient scams!
Idk my IRL friends subscribe to the gibbity and they like that they dont have to search reddit for answers.
Sad world we are in guys. No one IRL dislikes “ai”.
I don’t see what people liking it has to do with the fact Google is making less money due to the ai summaries meaning people aren’t clicking sponsored links.
Unless you think everyone you met likes it enough to start paying a monthly fee for it? Because I’ll bet they like it, but like it while it’s free
Um…they do. Several of my friends have a gibbity subscription (they pay monthly) and they love it. my employer pays 3500 a month for a gibbity subscription. .
Baffling how dumb people are.
Must the circles you run in. I literally know no individuals who have subscriptions. Businesses, yeah, but individuals no. Businesses are the kind of client that will look closely at the cost vs benefits and move to cheaper options (eg locally hosted models that do 90% of what the subscription does at 40% of the cost)
Well Google is making less money, so I am sure it’s not no one.
But I share your experience. My apartment complex (180 units) is very close knit, we are all similar income so it’s not a very diverse group. But, amongst us, most people don’t even realize they are using AI, they just see it as an update of the already existing Google Search which was also a mystery to them. People that do recognize it as a new thing have ChatGPT on their phone and love the thing.
There’s a slight chance that these companies aren’t losing money because of lack of adoption, but because of how expensive it is to train and keep these things operating.
Really funny how you got downvotes for suggesting people could like it. Even though you preface that it’s a sad fact.
Yeah its OK. I probably interact with more people IRL than other lemmings. And its bad out there. Normie’s in general loooove their slop bots. It stems from a lot of humans being idiots in general but also verrrrry tech illiterate.
I think I’ve only encountered clearly anti AI people twice IRL. What I found kinda ironic is how they both parroted the same anti AI talking points I’ve already seen online multiple times.
Well yeah, I’d imagine anti ai folk are largely technical because we actually know what’s going on, and are probably more likely to be on something like the fediverse. Normies just go oh, google has sure gotten shitty and then they keep using it.
Yyessss
Ironically I do like my basement. But i also have a life outside
I’m not a basement dweller because I can’t afford one.
I am not sure they are idiots. We do the same as them on other domain that got industrialised sooner in history. Most of us buy clothes pre-made by industries we know being evil. We know the pollution is huge, we know it involve child labour, we know the clothes are of poor quality and soon to be out of fashion anyway. But it is cheaper and more convenient than to buy our clothes hand made at some tailor.
We also do the same for fournitures, and some of us even buy industrial food.
Why would they prefer human made things just for IT domain? And if we reject machine made things in IT, why do we accept it in other domains?
But it is cheaper and more convenient than to buy our clothes hand made at some tailor.
more convenient? definitely. cheaper? y’all making me grateful for my tailor.
are you high? I had three conversations on the train this week. everyone hates this shit except delusional douchebros. maybe your friends are just stupid. or made up.
Nah, theyre stupid. And not techy at all.
stupid people do famously believe stupid shit at higher rates than the general population. your sample may not be representative.
have they tried putting more more ai in it? the investors all agreed this was the best solution!
