Google’s AI results are what finally got me to switch my default search engine to noai.duckduckgo.
You can set it with
in your web browser settings.
Edit: posting here keeps adding a “25” after the percent sign and before “s&noai=”. You don’t need the number there.
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
I use Start Page with Mozilla. Or brave with duck duck go
Kagi, ecosia, quant, ddg! Searxng for the nerds
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).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.
%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
same
Running a local search aggregator that’s been great - degoog.
deleted by creator
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…
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!
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?
have they tried putting more more ai in it? the investors all agreed this was the best solution!
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
yeah free stuff without ads always enshittifies. people just aren’t willing to support that kind of thing.
Not only make less money, but literally pay money for people to engage with it for free
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.
Hey it worked with the introduction of tablets. There’s already a ream of people who don’t know how to search for file locations or manually save
Duckduckgo.com Ftw
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
Yep, I only see the search page. Your opinion on converting my Google Home Minis to using Gemini? Sounds like I can do that now and the use has always been extremely limited.
Oh, none of these companies make money! They parasite off from governments practicing free market “Liberalism” giving them cash and contracts and they do pump and dump stock trading schemes to get good valuations, big investments and big bank loans then just time the accruing and dispersal of their debts carefully.
At some point the investments and saving accounts just start self-reproducing money because we don’t have an economy that expects organizations to have a trillion dollars… So it’s for practical purposes an infinite money glitch.
They don’t make money they just acquire enough of it that the money starts reproducing.
if you believe in healthy capitalism, every billionaire needs to be killed in brutal public ways.
if you don’t believe in capitalism every billionaire needs to be killed and you probably have some anger you want to work out on them.
Also, I’m sure all of that doesn’t cause/contribute to inflation \s
It’s temporary. They’ll start shutting down the non-AI alternatives soon enough and there will be grumbling, but people will fall in line like they always do. This is a minor hit. It’s them mentioning that people aren’t feeding enough into the dumpster fire, but they’re simultaneously sealing off more and more exits.
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.