Comment by qoez
4 days ago
I just use duckduckgo. Silly name but the results are no different (I switched not because of ai overview but because google said it had 'no results' for something that obviously did and I was fed up).
4 days ago
I just use duckduckgo. Silly name but the results are no different (I switched not because of ai overview but because google said it had 'no results' for something that obviously did and I was fed up).
I use DDG too, but that has also recently started inserting AI spam as the first result. I keep switching if off, but soon reappears. I dont care if it useful or not, but on principle I wont buy or use any service with 'AI', I find it almost as offensive as all the advertising shoved down our throats.
Just kill it with uBlock. The more elegant way would be to inject a proper parameter to session storage with some kind of extension. Or switch to the light version of the service https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/
edit: I can see that in a comment below @yegg shared an even better way - switching to https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
> Silly name but the results are no different
DDG is my default, but I’ll be the first to admit that the results are not as good. I have a bookmark to quickly switch to Google when I need something specific and DDG isn’t cutting it.
DDG also seems to have adopted the YouTube search strategy where once you scroll past the first several dozen results you start getting non-specific results that aren’t entirely related to your query.
DDG supports !g to direct the search to Google, among many, many other bang shortcuts: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
What's up with that search bar for bangs? Every time I write a new letter it appears to reload the webpage, polluting the browser history, and it's extremely slow, frequently missing letters if I type fast enough. That is by far the worst search bar that I have ever seen in any web page.
The normal DuckDuckGo also has their own AI assistant.
You need to use plain HTML DuckDuckGo in order to get rid of it.
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html
If you don't use Private Browsing (or the equivalent) or otherwise clear your browsing cache, DuckDuckGo's AI assistant can be disabled by:
- clicking the little gear to the right of the search types (near "Assist" and "Duck.ai")
- Click on "Manage" for AI Features
- Setting "Duck.ai" to Off
- Setting "Assist" to Never
To the right of the features above, I saw one can save their settings with a password, to the "cloud". This seems to be that you can enter this password when using DuckDuckGo elsewhere for your settings to be set again (or in Private sessions, though you'd have to re-enter the password on a new session).
We also offer https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ which is just regular DuckDuckGo with AI features turned off.
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Or you could turn it off in the settings, which is much easier: https://duckduckgo.com/settings#aifeatures
I really like duckduckgo for their bang commands.
Didn’t know about these, thanks for sharing!
I use Ecosia and it feels much better to me.
Local search ("shops nearby" type of thing) is much better at Google. But hey, that's what bangs are for. I use ddg as my primary, and if I don't like the results (1 out of 20 searches, if that), I just append !g and be on my merry way. (Often I find that Google also doesn't find what I'm looking for.)