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.
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?
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
Idiots. What a failure. All the had to do was change the prompt from “swap the search with a trillion dollar chat bot” to “swap the search with a trillion dollar chat bot and make it make more money” and they would’ve been golden.
have they tried putting more more ai in it? the investors all agreed this was the best solution!
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.
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.
Kagi, ecosia, quant, ddg! Searxng for the nerds
I ran ddg for a while it got crappy. I’ve since moved to kagi
The idea is cool but I think I’ll pass.
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.
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.
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
My beef isn’t with and has never been with the concept of a datacenter, lol. LLMs are so far removed from just a regular datacenter. They’re a shit smear across human history which will be reviled to future generations. There are few things more evil than a Ponzi Scheme which boils the earth and sells pure disinformation, even just a regular search engine company and advertisers will never measure up to that.
And people aren’t using them as search engines, either. They’re having entire conversations with them, and giving them extensive amounts of contexts in the hopes of “prompt engineering”.
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.
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.
It’s less about the price than what they offer: AI. Zero trust rating, throw them on the pile.
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
Running a local search aggregator that’s been great - degoog.
same
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.
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Technically they still made more money. They just made less than their projections by about a billion dollars.
Yeah, they made double-digit profits. They have been swimming in money for decades and their cash ocean is still getting bigger at an insane rate.
Revenue, however, rose 25% to an enormous $127.6bn. The figure was slightly below the roughly $128bn analysts had forecast.
Advertising revenue grew 11% to $82bn, short of expectations. Revenue from Google’s search business, still the company’s largest source of income, rose 12% to $63.4bn, slowing from 17% growth in the previous quarter.
Jesus, and that’s just from selling user data and ad placements? Yeah they are never willingly moving away from that business. Investors wouldn’t let them.
Thanks for posting the snip.
Jesus, and that’s just from selling user data
Technically no, at least not to other companies, that would be the dumbest thing for them to do
and ad placements?
Yeah, that’s the one.
Companies like Google and Meta prefer not selling your data because… why feed their own competition? Their product is access to the ad network which has profiles on everyone. If they sell that data to competitors, the competitors can build a good ad network too (though the space it can sell isn’t necessarily as premium of course).
They all will sell or even just share your data to some three letter government agencies though. Because those aren’t competition.
Right I’m oversimplifying—they sell their own programmatic “insights” on user data to let advertisers more creepily target and manipulate people.
And users will never willingly move away either, so we’re stuck with them getting bigger and bigger until the system collapses.
I mean some will but I get what you mean. Many people will just never pay the opportunity cost to divest themselves, no matter how far Google falls.
Aside: this is what people like us are good for. You’d better believe that everyone I know well knows that they can come to me if they ever want help degoogling, decorporatising, or otherwise exorcising their tech. Sometimes they even do.
I wish we had a solution to bring up maps on Android Auto without google, lmk if you figure something out.
I don’t know what that is, so I don’t know what you mean. I just use CoMaps. It doesn’t have every business by name, but then I’ll just look up their address online.
So new model car consoles have a touch screen in them and it can show you the route on google maps if you connect your phone via “Android Auto”. The Android Auto works to a limited extent with GrapheneOS and CalyxOS (TBH idk if they’re still around even) but it’s getting worse with recent updates requiring you to enable their AI Assistant Agent to use it at all, and it has always require specifically Google Maps to work.
lol they’re trying to undercut their entire profit model by spending billions on something nobody wants (well, the slop boys, but they’re never going to be able fund it by themselves) - groogle needs everyone on board and that’s never gonna happen. meanwhile it’s costing them dearly
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.
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.
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.
They ruined their search engine too
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…
you don’t understand! if everything only exists as byproducts of scams, we will get the best most efficient scams!
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.
Also the internet.
And mobile apps. And smartphones. And browsers. And image formats. And the general concept of privacy…
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.
Not only make less money, but literally pay money for people to engage with it for free
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.
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
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.
You have won the tournament of agree, SEO has always been a bullshit occupation and alarm that someone is dumb
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.
