EDIIT :
Apparently, there is an issue with the warning request to disable the ad blocker
I use Fennec F-Droid and Cromite, and I don’t see this issue.
to get around the adblocker warning, use this link.
DDG is relying on Google to get the results, no?
No. Bing
Well, isn’t that a shock. What I want to see is 💯 of web searchers avoiding Google.
who knew…
I don’t even care about an ai overview at the top. Give me a search engine that ranks down the sea of blogs that launched a year ago and have 5,000+ articles that are just ai generated bullshit designed to capture as many search queries as possible
Ecosia, ddg, google, brave, etc are all laden with this shit and it clogs up the searches. “How do I do x” and an endless stream of “achieving x is possible. Here’s a bulleted list of the next 12 paragraphs, then a bunch of summarized info from Reddit posts that only answers your question in the most basic obvious way and has no accounting for any kind of edge case or even just non traditional but acceptable use case. And even if you just wanted the basic answer its useless because the LLM fluffed the sentence long answer with 12 pages of meandering nonsense”
I don’t even mind people summarizing into they’ve found elsewhere, but like you said it’s the most basic information—it’s the opposite of summarizing, it’s whipping up this lexical froth of bullshit filler around a tiny kernel of a factoid.
Meandering nonsense exactly. Just plausible enough for you to keep reading, and probably impressive to someone who doesn’t know the domain, but as soon as you try to logically put together what you’ve read it falls apart.
The frustrating part is that getting around it sucks. I’m told Kagi has better support for this but from what I’ve read it relies on users downranking the domains, which is a fools errand given the flood of these sites. I’ve also seen people that maintain blocklists for this that work with things like adguard and uBlock but then you still get pages of slop, but all the links just 404 now
My conspiracy is that this is allowed and not dealt with to push people to use LLMs directly, which are quickly becoming the most effective way to search for information online (with the caveat that you either need to have the knowledge to identify errors or be willing to double check the information given for flaws. Also taking like 4-7x the energy to process queries)
Search for an item get a “19 best options for item in MAY 2026”, click, blurb & amazon links!
Just ignore anything written the last two years basically
I definitely de-emphasize it, but eventually the slop is going to sink down to the lower layers of the internet
Ai is fucking great at SEO. But maybe it’s time for a new system
Yeah it’s hijacked so many of our old (admittedly tenuous) trust systems.
The worst being that a piece of detailed “content” is evidence that a human being cared enough about something to put effort into making it.
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 I do appreciate this, their search results aren’t great. I hate to say this, but even with horrible AI forward results, Google still returns better and more relevant results. I’ll still use ddg first but it generally leaves me wanting.
Inalways default to DDG, and it gets me what I need 80% of the time. If not, do the search again with !g at the end and DDG will forward the search to Google
Usually if I search anything seriously, like for work, I use journals that require a subscription that I access through my institution. If I’m trying to find a funny meme, that’s different. Google is fine for the casual stuff, but since I just don’t like them DuckDuckGo seems like an acceptable alternative even though I’ve found it slightly less effective.
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 pay for the access because I need them to still exist in a decade.
+1 for Kagi’s base tier limit. It’s just not close to enough.
At the very least, I’d be far more approving if they didn’t make me pay for a separate 300 AI searches I’d never use. If it was just “600 searches, of any type” or even just “300 searches, of any type” that would be far more acceptable.
It’s more than enough some types, but I agree, probably not the average lemmy user. I’m happy enough with their search results to pay for a higher tier.
I’ve defaulted to ddg for like 2 years now. Solid. Good enough. Really what happened is that SEO optomization websites even before the AI craze made Google search so awful that ddg became just as good if not better for me than google
Same.
Google literally redesigned their search engine to be worse so that you would scroll through more ads to find the results you want. On average, the best result now is the fifteenth result.
That’s what happens when the engineers are forced out and the marketers are given control.
I let the default fall to DDG on some of my machines. I find they’re a better experience for 80% of searches. The rest are not handled well by any modern search engines and only Google in verbatim mode (and surprisingly Kagi) come close to delivering good results for those. I hope DDG improves and the team there sees the market forces that are essentially driving customers towards them. We don’t want AI shit, just good, non-evil, search.
Same here and I recently purchased a degoogled Fairphone 6.
i would love a degoogled phone, but i also lose my wallet fucking everywhere around the house (I swear, it goes in one spot but then it’s time for a clown drum circle and i can’t find my wallet for a week because i cleaned the damn house) so like i have gotten used to some creature comforts recently. you know how it goes.
I just wish they had their own web crawler instead of relying on Microsoft’s
I can’t find anything I’m looking for on Google anymore. It’s not a search engine, it’s just ads.
…Installs?
Do they know there’s a website?
You don’t even need the website. I just set the default search engine to DDG in my browser.
A search app makes zero sense to me.
“search app” is a weird categorization for “web browser.”
The reason why companies like to push apps over websites is that apps can gather more information about you. Not saying DDG does this, but it is weird.
For their defense this could be to place search bar on main screen, as looks like Google no longer allows to switch to a different search engine in their default launcher.
The DDG app is pretty cool though. It has free app tracking protection.
As a tangent, it’s kind of insane that the NPR app seems to always have like 10x tracking attempts vs tiktok.
So much, this. My brokerage apps are my biggest offenders for phoning to unauthorized parties, makes me nervous as hell.
I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, that I miss using Mullvad but that DDG supplanted them as my VPN of choice, just because there are other anti-tracking and adjacent security Services integrated into my life so seamlessly.
Unrelated to DDG, if you sideload on Android I want to shill HARD for this FDroid package, called Hail, , which when powered with Shizuku can fully suspend apps selectively at will.
So I identify any apps that like to phone home regularly, and just tell them to aggressively take naps until summoned, I feel like I only want to allow 10% of my apps to run to the background regularly. This app gives me a toggle for that, and DDG is my lamp light for selecting the most egregious offenders.
Thanks for the recommendation, probably better than me just putting any app I haven’t used in the last week into deep sleep mode or whatever it’s called haha.
Surely that doesn’t mean you have the NPR app installed, does it?.. 🤢
There are too many damn apps already imo, but apparently some people like having as many as possible
DuckDuckGo said U.S. app installs went up 18.1% week-over-week on average during the May 20 to May 25 period, compared to May 13 to May 18. The company said that growth was sustained for six consecutive days and peaked at 30.5% on May 25. On iOS, the rate of install is even higher, with week-over-week growth hitting a 33% average, peaking at 69.9%.
Well, in this case it helps to override my default search engine on my phone.
ngl, I never thought about changing the default search engine on Android. That was the last place where I was still using Google.
Installing the DDG app right now 😂
From Chrome to DDG browser likely. Google also have a website but people still install Chrome for it, the lastest AI thing might be the final straw for people to finally looking for the alternative
I think DDO has its own Firefox fork.
Nope, as far as i know it uses chrorium and on android a webview wrapper
“install” websites, i’ll never understand
We’ve come full-circle. I used to download .html pages so I could browse them while offline. Now websites install themselves so they can browse you while offline.
In capitalist America, the content watches you!
Too many people are brain hostages to the idea that apps do everything and you need an app for everything, even though most of the things are just websites. But all the apps are really doing is spying while they deliver their version of the website.
I bought a literal thermometer, not a thermostat just a thermometer, which I wanted to log temperatures, and it insisted on me downloading an app and then setting up a free account. Noped out of that s*** and left caustic reviews but it was impossible to use without a smart device, without internet access, and without the invasion of privacy.
Just repeat that story a hundred times and you’re describing modern domestic life.
I thought it meant changing your default search engine.
I never considered that it was an app.
Everything is an app.
I “love” when the wrong technology is applied.
On the the dawn of the smartphones Mozilla tried to enter the space with an FirefoxOS and the pitch was that every app was just a website just more tightly integrated with the phone. The problem is that all the web stack is wonderfully resource hog and at the time phones were super underpowered running websites were not optimized in a browser that were not as optimized as today. So it was a terrible choice for the time being.
Other good one was Android early days. They choose Java as the default app environment and development. It kinda makes sense to use it if you want the same program to run on different platforms, the problem, again, it runs worst and with the underpowered devices of the time everything was a slog. And they doubled down on the mistake by using a garbage collector that doubled the memory usage of every app. The cherry on top, at least in hindsight is that arm was and still is the de facto Android plataform, greatly disminishing the advantage of using Java/JVM. And today Google enabled apps with native code optimized for specific plataforms, but everyone only care about ARM so of you try to run Android like in an Intel laptop a lot of apps are not compatible.
End of rant.
Hey dude, just wanted to say that I learned a little bit from you today. Thanks for sharing on here.
I remember Apple famously disallowing any kind of “Write Once, Run Anywhere” platform tech at the dawn of iOS, ATVos and iPad OS, quite openly trying to fuck with Adobe’s and Sun’s shit.
But using apps to avoid needing all of the traffic and rendering capabilities for modern websites was key in its early days and I remember even 10 years ago recommending to clients and customers that were stuck with awful internet connections or underpowered devices, to try using the apps instead of the websites for things.
Nowadays, I only want to visit so many corpo resources strictly through a browser and fighting tooth and nail to avoid ever letting their apps on my phones. I would literally fire a bank for not having a functional Web page to do what I need done , especially since I probably can’t be on vanilla android for much longer the way things are going and too many secure apps require Google Play services for their circle of trust.
There’s a DDG privacy first browser on Android. This is probably what they are referring to.
DDG still features AI enshittification, but at least one can opt-out… For now.
This was my thought when I briefly reinstalled the browser, the AI mode seems very similar to what google announced at their I/0 con
More people will probably switch when they figure out they don’t need to install anything and can change their default search engine on their current browser.
More people will probably switch when they figure out they don’t need to install anything and can change their default search engine on their current browser.
FTFY
Thank you for this! I changed to duckduckgo just now and it took 5 seconds. Now to see if it works as well as Google.
The bangs are the addictive feature for me. You start by typing
!w lemmyin the URL bar, with DDG already configured as the default search engine, and DDG will directly serve the search result for this term from Wikipedia. There are hundreds of them like!ytfor YouTube or!gmfor Google Maps, and the acronyms are intuitive. https://duckduckgo.com/bangsThis should be a YSK post
O_o I had no idea. This is really useful.
Why… do you need to go through DDG for this? You can just set those custom search engines yourself in the browser without routing through DDG. They let you put any link (with
%sin place of the query’s location in the URL) and almost any keybinding. I havewset to attempt to pull up the direct Wikipedia article on the query,cfor Google Contacts,mfor Google Maps (ugh, I’ve gotta figure out a way outta these Google snares…), etc.
Happy to help - feel free to spread the word!
You can also set up the ai-free search, noai.duckduckgo.com, as a custom search engine.
Whoa, that’s great news. Thanks for that!
It doesn’t and when you discover that, try Kagi.
People here love things to be free and in doing so, they recommend worse search engines.
I like free but will check it out when I have some money, thanks
Is the search engine open source? Is it self-hostable? If the a answer to both answer, especially the first, is no, then it can be easly ignored tbh, and Kagi is also paid so it’s really a bad suggestion (unless you mention it), people ain’t gonna switch from free to paid that easly.
I have to pay someone and then hope that they don’t sell my data? Hell nah;
Before you say anything releated to DDG: no, i am not saying you should choose DDG, that it’s the better decision, the next best search engine, what i said is unreleated to DDG specifically
Well, I think its different for different users, with different economy and different motivations.
Kagi has 70000 paying members, enough to be profitable without any ads or tracking. Since the results are literally Googles results but without ads, AI results or tracking, it’s worth paying for for some people who can.
Ive been a paying member since 2023 and I feel good about supporting alternatives to Google with some lunch money. :) Because of me and the other users, there is a quality search engine that makes us happy and makes a profit without ads.
But we are all different. When I was a teenager I wouldn’t have paid for this. Had no money and wanted my money for other things.
Next time i suggest to at least mention that kagi is paid, i say it mainly because many users will not catch that immediatly (me included, i understood it only after i made the account, and only because i saw the max querys i could do or smth else i don’t remember rn) so you avoid to waste people’s time that aren’t interessed, i see many people that don’t mention it but i think it’s essential
that is on level that i meanwhile believe 90% of people can’t handle or even understand
In case people don’t want to, or can’t access, the article. Apologies for any formatting issues, I’m on my mobile.
Last week, after Google announced its huge overhaul to Search, I overheard a woman on the phone saying she was switching to DuckDuckGo because you can “opt out of using AI.”
“Google just isn’t Google anymore,” she said. It seems that others had the same idea.
At I/O, Google’s annual developer conference, the company said its traditional list of blue links is being replaced by an AI agent that answers queries, executes tasks, and runs background monitoring agents.
The backlash has been sharp.
Some have argued it will kill the open web, while others shared concerns that AI overviews surface inaccurate responses and take away control from users who might not want to use AI. It also overcomplicates simple things. Just try to Google the word “disregard.”
In response to Google’s changes, many have begun defecting to DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused alternative that has never been able to break past Google’s dominance, accounting for only around 2% of the U.S. search market.
During Google’s search antitrust trial in 2023, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg testified that Google’s exclusive default search contracts harmed its ability to pitch itself as the default on other browsers.
“Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out,” Weinberg said Tuesday in a statement, referring to Google’s Search overhaul. “As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want.”
Now it seems that DuckDuckGo is beginning to benefit as consumers flee AI.
DuckDuckGo said U.S. app installs went up 18.1% week-over-week on average during the May 20 to May 25 period, compared to May 13 to May 18. The company said that growth was sustained for six consecutive days and peaked at 30.5% on May 25. On iOS, the rate of install is even higher, with week-over-week growth hitting a 33% average, peaking at 69.9%.
The search engine also said visits to its AI-free search page, noai.duckduckgo.com, averaged 22.7% WoW growth, peaking at 27.7% on May 24. The page turns off every AI feature, like AI-assisted answers and AI-generated images, by default.
The company said the trend is stronger in the U.S., and that DuckDuckGo continued to gain users over the Memorial Day weekend, when it usually sees a dip in traffic.
DuckDuckGo offers its own AI product called Duck.ai. It’s free and doesn’t require users to make an account but provides access to models, including Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 4 Scout, Mistral’s Small 3 24B, and OpenAI’s GPT-5 mini. All chats are private because DuckDuckGo strips the user’s IP address before requests reach model providers, deletes conversations within 30 days, and prevents chats from being used for training.
“Not only do we respect user choice, but also user privacy,” Weinberg said. “Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is private; we don’t collect search histories or chats and nothing is used for AI training.”
DuckDuckGo also offers Search Assist, which is similar to Google’s AI overviews, and an AI Image Filter that filters out AI-created images from search results.
Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s chief communications and policy officer, said both of those AI features are among the company’s most popular, despite their differing ethos.
“People just want a choice,” Bazbaz said.
TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment.
Re: DDG AI convos “aren’t used for training”.
They can’t be sure of that. The models themselves could be logging prompts and outputs for training or whatever reason. Only question is if they value those logs, though they could just have their LLM curate them to filter out low quality ones, if the space is even an issue.
If there’s no user feedback reaching their servers, there’s limited value to be extracted from the logs.
There is feedback that makes it back to their servers: the next prompt.
Though from my understanding, a lot of the agentic tools do a lot of prompt generation, so that would be a weakness of just logging everything and using subsequent prompts to evaluate earlier ones. They’d have no idea whether each prompt is coming from an actual user or another LLM.
Yeah, I was about to say that’s a bit of a pipe dream. There’s just way too much of a cost to processing prompts by someone else without trying to get something out of them.
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.
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
Well that’s neato, thanks for sharing
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
Sure, but it’s a buyer beware kind of thing.
Last time I tried I had issues but it was quite a while ago. Do you know a good guide or something you can post?
I hate to say it, but I just had Claude generate the guide. The docker container is the easiest way I think.
Fair enough, I’ll look into it!
I have it installed in a docker container in Linux both as a search 3ngine for my local AI setup, and for regular browsing.
Setup and installation is a great use case for AI.
Go to Google gemini, and ask it to create a step by step guide to install a container with searxng, and how to allow searches from your browser(s). Make sure you tell gemini that you are a simple user, not a power user, so it shouldn’t assume anything. Also ask it to make sure it shows you how to make the container autostart with the pc. Tell gemini that you want this in a step by step tutorial.
Should make it easy, as you can ask questions if you get stuck, or something doesn’t work.
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.
No, they’re not, but they are one of the better-known alternatives to Google, and they do advocate privacy. This, in itself, is a good thing and should be promoted.
The problem is that Google’s monopoly on web search is so large that using Google is the de facto standard for the vast majority of people. Getting them to acknowledge that there are alternatives to Google benefits privacy on the internet more than DDG having contracts with MS harms it.
Switching from Google to MS/Bing isnt really much of a privacy win.
Switching from a search engine that heavily tracks you to a search engine that doesn’t is a privacy win.
Think microslop doesn’t track you? Think again.
I’m not sure if I correctly get your point: DDG provides search results based on Bing and has advertisment contracts with MS but DDG in itself doesn’t track you:
From DDGs FAQ:
We partner with many different information sources to deliver DuckDuckGo Search (e.g., Microsoft for ads, Apple for maps, etc.). When you view search results (including ads), your searches cannot be tied back to you, either by us or our partners. How this works technically is we do not store any personal identifiers (e.g., IP address) with your search terms, and we also proxy all requests to partners through us.
Rule of thumb is to not take their word as gospel. All social media also present themselves as being concerned about your privacy when they are anything but.
Search engine ad set-ups include trackers typically.
DuckDuckGo literally uses Bing for search results.
Why should I literally care?
What’s the alternative? The basically unusable Mojeek? Rawdogging Bing? SearXNG?
Qwant and Ecosia teamed up to make a European indexer/web crawler. They’re still using Bing to pad the result quality for now but slowly phasing out reliance on Bing from what I understand.
Still, they also push AI so can use this argument:
Ecosia have to use cookies unfortunately to disable AI overview:
