This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
DDG isn't the holy grail people make it out to be; it has contracts with Microsoft and we all know how Microslop likes AI.
I haven't used Google for about three years now, other than to compare it to DDG results now and then.
They are not the same, in spite of the claims of others on Lemmy.
DDG does have an AI assistant that you can turn off (allegedly). This is on Firefox browser, Windows OS.
For what it’s worth, DDG recognized this immediately.
They dipped their toe in AI search, felt the pushback, and went all-in on putting toggles and immediately accessible opt-outs everywhere. They put a filter for AI images (and I hope they do the same for AI SEO spam).
In other words, they actually leaned in and listened to their own users. Unlike the soulless vampire on a throne Google has become.
While their first party browser convinced me if it's privacy capabilities, I need extensions (yes, recognizing that makes me much more fingerprintable) so I use their browser less than 1% of the time.
However, I have subscribed for their premium Services because I already trust their anti-tracker on my mobile devices and they have sufficient number of VPN nodes to be useful to me (I do miss Mullvad, and probably will use them when I'm traveling International, but it is getting harder to find good nodes and they don't have servers in south Korea at all, either).
And their measures to make a neutered and neutral AI interface is the first time I've ever paid for general AI access, finding it's helped some of my efforts as AI has been a necessary component for building my home studio and mini rack. I'm scared that my brain has already been ruined, acclimating to Google's integration of Bard and then later Gemini, and I make a regular exercise of hunting for sites that have articles or discussions that will help me work through tech projects and puzzles "the hard way" with just vanilla search queries and amendments.
I love that DDG's tech stack seems to play well in the general broader ecosystem, so it's my search engine of choice for all of my Gecko/Fusion browsers (Fennec, WaterFox, LibreWolf, and occasionally, full-fat vanilla Firefox).
I had really thought I could grow into using Kagi but I couldn't make it make sense for myself. When you're limiting paid subscribers at the first tier to 300 general web queries a month, and i could consume that many just on correcting my own typos and re-searches alone, DDG was a better investment for me for the time being.
TL;DR - I love that these guys play well with others, so I'll even pray for the access because I need them to still exist in a decade.
I can't find anything I'm looking for on Google anymore. It's not a search engine, it's just ads.
'just duckduckgo it'
Duck it, we'll search it live
Until real Americans take their country back from the corrupt pedophile protecting "administration", I'll mostly avoid US search engines altogether.
Those who enable and finance the pedophiles are international... they won't disappear when Trump dies, they have old money and are multigenerational. Trump is just a stooge for international interests, like Epstein was.
See Deutsch Bank, for example... they financed Trump with billions of dollars, and broke the law to do so. Without them, Trump would not be President today.
Also, look at the funders of organizations like The Heritage Foundation; coincidentally, many members are shared between them and the Council on Foreign Relations. All of this will remain when Trump is gone.
Still I prefer ecosia
My friend just told me ddg is now better than google search
The thing that is hilarious about this is that DDG is powered by Bing. 😂
The thing about THAT is Bing built their house literally copying Google's homework. In the early days (maybe 2013? Long before they went masks-off) google published examples of them inventing new unique words that didn't organizational exist in open web pages, and those popping up and Bing search indexes 3 weeks later.
Kagi, at least according to a few talks Doctorow of the EFF gave in recent history, admit their indices just came from Google's as well.
Watching everyone's favorite advertising agency turn heal so swiftly has been one of the biggest bummers of my adult life.
Now? It's been better than Google for a while. Google's results have been bad for a long time.
yep, me too. you can put "-ai" at the end of your search to shut off the slop, but it's a PITA. Often I'll just go to DDG.
Its not crazy hard to install your own searxng instance. Works pretty well. The problem is that the Internet itself is turning into AI slop.
Check out yacy, its not well polished but at least it doesn't rely on major search engines afaik (p2p)
The problem with your own searxng instance is that your searches across other engines come from your IP address.
So if you're searching for something, everyone knows it's you using IP triangulation. Google then tracks you around the internet.
If that doesnt bother you, OK great.
You could install a proxy to expose their IP instead of your i guess
Dude I don't even know what that is or what it does and I'm pretty sure most people don't either. It might be easy but what the heck even is it?
It let's you have one search website where you have it pull results from all other search engines (that you want) and then it can rank results based on where things rank on the various engines.
Tl;dr self hosted search proxy, with some advanced features
I use duckduckgo for simple searches and google when it's something more complicated. I don't like google tho, too nosy and too much ads.
I just searched earlier and DDG had a link telling me to try its AI (I think it was on my mobile on firefox). At least it didn't force it, I guess.
I hate that ddg has "show AI images" on by default
It's great it even has a toggle.
But I like that it has that toggle at least
