Hacker News

points by verdverm 5 days ago | 0 comments

DDG is trying to be too much like Google now, with the Ai summaries and chat bot.

Actual search results are still bad. Seems to be a trend across most engines

[–] anonova 5 days ago

DDG has an entrypoint with AI features disabled at https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

[–] verdverm 5 days ago

how long will that last and be given effort?

the direction they want to go is clear for me, similar to proton

[–] gyulai 4 days ago

http://html.duckduckgo.com/

https://lite.duckduckgo.com/

These are still a thing for people who don't like JavaScript, so I'd give them some credit.

And it's not like these don't cost anything to run and maintain. Quite the contrary: bots love to use them, and it screws with their ads-driven business model. And yet they are still keeping these around.

I think that "noai", too, will keep going for a long time.

[–] verdverm 4 days ago

they are pushing their Ai across all their web assets, also their own browser, with popups and notifications

very google-y to me, or valley-y is probably more accurate, par for the course across so many products these days (in your face)

[–] ddejohn 4 days ago

I appreciate that they do this, but their results are still trash. Even been having problems with Kagi lately.

[–] charcircuit 5 days ago

No student is going to use that over the default.

[–] collinmcnulty 5 days ago

The point is that if a school wants to use DDG but not AI, DDG is going to happily oblige them, not pull this stunt like Google.

[–] verdverm 5 days ago

I turned off all Ai features, then DDG added their search summaries, despite my setting for no ai

DDG pulls stunts too

I'm moving to API based search options, using multiple, and rendering them as markdown for myself or my agent

[–] lokar 5 days ago

Years ago Google did the same thing for “safe search”, a url schools could allow.

[–] shevy-java 4 days ago

> DDG is trying to be too much like Google now

I noticed the same with Qwant. They even try to copy the useless UI for Google. And on top of that I get a 2 seconds delay "verifying device".

It seems nobody knows how to create a proper search engine anymore. Google search is also useless compared to "the good old days".

[–] Dwedit 5 days ago

Duckduckgo's AI search feature is utterly worthless. Brave Search does a much better job (that is, if you don't mind 50+ captchas per week).

[–] verdverm 5 days ago

I won't touch brave or anything the crypto ecosystem

I'm using API search like EXA, the incentives feel more aligned