7 ms·

DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms

309 points by jaredwiener 4mo ago

gattac_janitor 4mo ago
I switched to duckduckgo last week and i am really loving it. I tried their browser but I was getting a lot of 'this browswer is no longer supported messages'. I think I will try brave next.
- Fogest 4mo ago
  I've been liking the Brave browser. The only thing I dislike is how many damn Cloudflare captcha's I have to go through all across the web. However in a way this may actually be a feature as I believe it shows that Brave's fingerprinting protections are actually effective. I didn't get these on other browsers as they were likely very easily fingerprinted. I did have one site which told me I needed to use Chrome, Edge, or Firefox to use their site. Which kind of made me laugh considering the engine Brave uses. It was a really interactive JS heavy training site, so I guess they really wanted to be sure the browser was compatible to avoid support issues.
- Arubis 4mo ago
  If you're looking for a no-AI vibe from your browser, you probably won't get it from Brave. Zen might be a better fit. If you're just trying new browsers to see what's out there and clean, I've really liked Orion.
  - gattac_janitor 4mo ago
    Thanks for the advice I will check them out.
  - gwbas1c 4mo ago
    Interesting. I hid the Ask Leo button eons ago when it showed up, so I never feel an "AI encroach." That being said, I've used "Ask Leo" a handful of time, with mixed results. It's really good for "Give me the TLDR" or "Find the part of the page that talks about X".
- TimByte 4mo ago
  If you're on macOS, take a look at Orion from the team behind Kagi Search. It runs on WebKit, is really light on battery usage, doesn't come bundled with crypto stuff or AI agents, and still supports Chrome and Firefox extensions natively
consp 4mo ago
Since google got as bad as bing, it doesn't matter anymore and ddg is fine (afaik still the main source). This is just a plus.
- Carbon1603 4mo ago
  Ddg is fine for me for English terms and non-work. For my search terms in other languages and work stuff, Google still can't be matched.
d_silin 4mo ago
The logical business opportunity in the current LLM-boom is to create a bunch of AI-less services and products, and then charge money to access them. Think of premium branding analogy: masses get cheap AI slop, wealthy get high quality human-curated and human-created produce. Like organic vs regular food.
- king_zee 4mo ago
  This is sad and dystopian, why don't companies instead make AI optional in their products?
  - d_silin 4mo ago
    Among IT giants, Apple is the only such option.
- Xirdus 4mo ago
  This only works if your business is large enough that you and all your competitors aren't expected to have humans doing everything already, but small enough that going AI won't boost your valuation by much. My intuition is that the intersection is pretty much empty.
  - d_silin 4mo ago
    Who says "valuation"? I am talking about "profits", something that none of the the upcoming IPO debutantes have managed to achieve.
    - Xirdus 4mo ago
      For the founders, IPO/merger is pure profit. They don't care what happens afterwards.
- unfitted2545 4mo ago
  Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism touches on this concept, where there's a constantly shifting opposition to the market that itself becomes engulfed in its own market, to be advertised. So for example all the productivity/digital detox channels and videos are themselves a consumer demand to be watched on YouTube, on phones. And now we have anti-AI products marking themselves higher for a feature that didn't previously exist. It's like the tree of capital gets split at every turn.
jerf 4mo ago
"Wait, we're getting an influx of new users, and they actively don't want us to run the most expensive part of our search results page?" Where can I find such accommodating customers myself?
- cassianoleal 4mo ago
  Pretty much everywhere. AI is only popular with AI providers and delusional C-suites.
  - miyoji 4mo ago
    Hey, don't forget about all the programmers who are excited to help destroy their own livelihoods for no extra compensation.
    - elzbardico 4mo ago
      I think that a lot of those overly enthusiastic engineer AI fanboys are just playing a rational game driven by their perception that AI is a effective substitute for them, and that the only way to survive the comming culling is by being seen on the market as something an AI thought leader. Basically, signalling that they are going to be cooperative subjects for the enemy's occupation of the land. "I, for one, welcome our new giant insect overlords" is, IMHO, the operative meme here. Others are just addicted, the cycle of fast interaction and reward in coding agents is not very different from gambling or crack cocaine.
      - Groxx 4mo ago
        The rational game here is extremely straightforward, and even has big names like "prisoner's dilemma" behind it: Unionize.
      - hparadiz 4mo ago
        I like how everyone on HN feels entitled to a profession that hasn't even existed for 100 years and that is constantly changing. Talk about addiction.
bko 4mo ago
> Since then, traffic to DuckDuckGo has been booming. Last week, the company noted that web visits to its no-AI search page were up nearly 30% week-over-week, and its U.S. app installs were also up 18.1% week-over-week, with U.S. iOS app installs peaking at 69.9% week-over-week growth. Of course there are no absolute numbers or scale. This is just an advertisement for DuckDuckGo. It's gross that previously respected tech publications run this kind of slop for clicks
- ricardo81 4mo ago
  DDG used to have a graph showing the number of queries they did daily. It was around 100 million searches a day before they removed it a few years back. They were receiving bad press at the time IIRC. An educated guess is they're doing a similar number of searches today.
  - dredmorbius 4mo ago
    Oh, pity, seems they did kill that. The traffic graph used to be at: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic It was originally just a raw traffic graph, see <https://web.archive.org/web/20130711215117/https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130711215117/https://duckduckg...>. By late 2022 (18 November) it was a tabular presentation without the graph, and disappeared shortly afterward: <https://web.archive.org/web/20221118045948/https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://web.archive.org/web/20221118045948/https://duckduckg...>. It's gone by 6 Dec 2022 (redirect to homepage): <https://web.archive.org/web/20221206080717/https://duckduckgo.com/traffic/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221206080717/https://duckduckg...>
ghost_pepper 4mo ago
Anyone with experience know how DuckDuckGo compares to Kagi in terms of quality of search results?
- TimByte 4mo ago
  [dead]
- superkuh 4mo ago
  It's very similar to kagi in that it only ever allows you to see 200 results per query.
- Fogest 4mo ago
  I just stopped paying for Kagi as I personally found I stopped using search as much now that I am paying for an AI chatbot. So I have now switched to using DDG. I personally think Kagi did often have better results. I sometimes find myself adding the `!g` bang to my search so I can get the Google search results as sometimes DDG lets me down. I didn't do this much at all when I was using Kagi. But this is also just my anecdotal experience and I haven't been on DDG for long yet since Kagi, so my perspective may not be proper yet.
- anonymouscaller 4mo ago
  I find DDG results to be lower quality than Kagi, have never liked Bing's index. I also frequently use the personalized site rankings feature in Kagi to strip out known junky sites
- bigstrat2003 4mo ago
  Far worse, in my experience. DDG was my first attempt to switch off Google, but the results just weren't very good and I frequently had to use the !g query option to get good results. With Kagi, I consistently get better results than Google.
Fogest 4mo ago
To be honest, I didn't find DuckDuckGo's AI on the top of their search to be very good anyway compared to the one Google has. However can't say I have cared much as typically if I am searching I don't want an AI response, otherwise I'd just go straight to an AI chat interface in the first place.
- ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo ago
  The Google one is personalized to use language and sources that you'd prefer. They're building an individual response for each person that is most suited to trick that person into clicking on their ads. For some people they dont care, but I myself dont want a digital clone of me tricking me into buying things. Salesman have for a long time teaching new salesman to use NLP tricks like matching and mirroring to convince people you're relatable and trustworthy. Google is doing this with all the data they have on you.
  - Fogest 4mo ago
    Yeah for sure. When I was using Kagi for example, I had to be far more specific especially if I am looking for things that are more local such as local businesses. I personally don't mind having to do this and I knew when signing up for something like Kagi that it wasn't going to be able to use information it has tracked about me to give me these kinds of "better" search results. So at the end of the day there is a trade-off that has to be made for privacy. Sometimes I do throw the `!g` bang in there if I want to be redirected to Google in order to get those more localized/personal results and knowing I am trading off some privacy.
- nomel 4mo ago
  Biggest problem is that google has a near exclusive deal with reddit, so all other search engines have old reddit results [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033
  - Fogest 4mo ago
    Yeah that does make sense, though I have found the DDG AI to give me some pretty misleading, incorrect, or just completely off answers which prompted me to throw the !g on the search to see what the Google AI would have given. I'm sure this is overall because of there being more training data, however I do think that is a good reason to simply not bother with the DDG AI. If the AI is going to provide mediocre or wrong answers a lot, then it seems better to just not have it. Unfortunately I have seen far too many people, especially less tech savvy ones rely pretty heavily on the AI summaries provided by the search engines. And I think it can be a bit dangerous to have these results be super unreliable in what they state. The Google one also isn't perfect, but I've at least found it's a bit more accurate. However I personally don't really care for either. As I mentioned in my OP if I already made the choice to use a search engine, it's likely because I don't care for an AI response as I could open up Claude/ChatGPT or whatever's interface and ask the question there if I just wanted AI.
mentalgear 4mo ago
Been using DDG now for years since I noticed a few years back already that its search results were at least equal, if not superior, to G00$le.
TehCorwiz 4mo ago
I've been using DDG for years and it's at least as good as Google for most general use. I still keep it set as the default search engine. For some context sensitive searches where words overlap with more common topics I have a Kagi subscription.
MeetingsBrowser 4mo ago
DDG has been my daily driver for more than a decade now and I could not be more pleased. Better privacy, good results, no drama, first search engine to include bangs, and its free!
superkuh 4mo ago
DDG would be a lot better if lite.duckduckgo.com didn't automatically block anyone who looks deeper than 200 search results as a bot and then force a JS only challenge on the lite page (that crashes old browsers). I think this false positive could be solved by DDG lite returning more than 10 results per page.
- capitainenemo 4mo ago
  Huh. Didn't know there were 2 non-JS interfaces. I get redirected to https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ (which is also 10 per page). I do appreciate that DDG has it at all. Google blocks all non-JS searches these days. I've never noticed the challenge, but then, I don't think I've ever clicked 20 pages into the search results either. Usually if I've clicked on a couple of pages I feel it's time to refine my query..
ceheaaf 4mo ago
[flagged]
- AlienRobot 4mo ago
  Replace journalism with AI summaries... of what? What is the AI going to summarize once journalism is dead?
  - dotcoma 4mo ago
    Press releases, which is what too much of what we call ‘journalism’ summarises anyway.
- luhn 4mo ago
  > So, the "Ai is not the default" claim is bullshit Where was this claim made? Nowhere in the article says that.
- Groxx 4mo ago
  "AI is not the default" is not a claim made anywhere AFAICT, especially not with that wording. The only thing you could be referring to is the explicitly no-ai url, which AFAICT has no "Auto-Generated" "Search Assist" (that's kinda the point), and it also hasn't used that phrase ever that I've seen in months. So I kinda feel I have to ask: did you read the article, or did you read an AI summary?
- AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
  Edit: I know how to turn off the goddamn AI that’s not the point I've used DDG as my primary search and it was maddening when they put that stupid AI response thing in there last year because it was not helpful and I'm a huge advocate of AI Everything is marketing now
  - rpdillon 4mo ago
    Just use http://noai.duckduckgo.com/ http://noai.duckduckgo.com/, which is mentioned in TFA.
TimByte 4mo ago
I think a lot of people aren't actually against AI itself. Personally I just want to choose when I need a chatbot and when I want a normal list of links. Over the last few years, that line has started getting pretty blurry
- malfist 4mo ago
  > Over the last few years, that line has started getting pretty blurry Is that because every page you land on these days is just AI slop?
marcosdumay 4mo ago
I would be way happier with the old site-specific excepts and no AI on the search results, but the AI page still a click away like it's today. DDG today has two search options, IMO, both could get some improvement.
- WolfeReader 4mo ago
  Can you give an example of what you're talking about? I just ran a search on an author I started reading, and the results had no AI and no obvious link to AI. Using Android and IronFox if that has an effect: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&origin=funnel_home_website&q=Christopher+Ruocchio https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&origin=funnel_home_websi...
  - marcosdumay 4mo ago
    The no-ai page has no ai, no except, and no link that will bring your query to the ai prompt. DDG probably won't want the first and the last there, but the second is valuable. The normal page has a link to the ai, and used to have an ai except (IDK if it disappeared because I went to the no-ai page), but before that it used to have an except taken from the most relevant page by a set of rules. The link to ai is useful, and the old except was very useful.
feverzsj 4mo ago
"&udm=14" still works on google.
shevy-java 4mo ago
So, Google killing off google search, is probably the number #1 reason for DuckDuckGo growing - that and how AI ruins everything now. Unfortunately, whenever I used DuckDuckGo, the search results were also crap - and the User Interface was crap too. For some reason these web-searches suck, from A to Z, starting at the UI, but more importantly showing search "results" that are really qualitatively not good or inclusive. We already HAD good results - Google search used to be usable, then Google killed it off deliberately. Some inspiration Google appears to have taken from youtube, where you can search for "xyz", and it shows you "abc" instead after a while, which is horrible but not totally horrible as you may just watch another video. But for exact text search, copying that was stupid. Google ruined its search engine deliberately over several years, hoping that people will never notice it. And now we should use this crap AI garbage "search"? That is a privatized web. I refuse to help transition to private actors controlling the www. For similar reasons I do not use AMP and recommend everyone to not fall for the trap Google puts at you. Either way, someone can hopefully tell the DuckDuckGo team to offer alternatives that do not suck in their search engine. (Qwant also sucks, by the way - they just copy/pasted Google's search UI; perhaps some people want it, I don't. I want oldschool search. Simple. Stay simple. Don't clutter the UI. Don't add garbage. Don't lie to the user. And so forth.)
adregan 4mo ago
My issue with DDG AI result is that sometimes I would accidentally hit the "more" button to expand the result and it would begin a painfully slow crawl of text that pushed the results I was actually interested in further and further down the page. It was usually preferable to refresh rather than wait. So this is a welcome change.
- charonn0 4mo ago
  The "More" button changes to a "Stop" button when clicked.
nikhilpareek13 4mo ago
[flagged]
ChrisArchitect 4mo ago
Related: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296649
emaccumber 4mo ago
I switched to DDG search three months ago, and unfortunately it's much inferior to Google. Maybe I've subconsciously optimized my queries for Google these past 20 years and need to rethink how to query using DDG, though.
- Valodim 4mo ago
  Try kagi :)
- capitainenemo 4mo ago
  I will say it's nice to have them actually honour keywords in searches that google has made harder and harder to discover and seems to ignore at will (inurl: site: etc) The funniest one for me in google is +"foo" they decided people didn't actually mean it, so they changed it to +""foo"" - then when we all started doing that, they made the new secret "yes I really want that string" to be +"""foo"""
- olyjohn 4mo ago
  I dunno man. I switched years ago, and still to this day, when I get a bad set of results... I throw a g! on it, and still get shitty results.
deleted 4mo ago
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skrtskrt 4mo ago
Kagi is still by far the best results for me, particularly for engineering content and worth every dollar. DuckDuckGo results are even more frustrating than the currently-terrible version of Google for finding good information IMO.
bradley13 4mo ago
You have to ask: Why is Google pushing the AI results? You would think that this would impact their ad revenue. Since Google is fundamentally an ad company, this deserves a closer look. My suspicion - for which I have no proof - is this: With search results, Google marks the ads. The marking has gotten ever more subtle over the years, but it's there. If you want to avoid clicking on ads, you can. With AI, Google wants to integrate ads seamlessly into the results. If you search for widgets, and Acme Corp. has paid Google enough, the AI summary will praise the virtues of Acme's widgets. And the user will have no idea that this is paid placement, instead of a summary of product reviews, etc..
- aexer0e 4mo ago
  The simple answer is due to popular demand. I remember when people were doom-posting about how chat GPT was making google obsolete before Google introduced AI summaries, and no one has been saying that after Google introduced it.
  - nitwit005 4mo ago
    There's an entirely valid concern about losing traffic to a competitor, but that doesn't make it logical to drop the old product some people still clearly prefer. Like many companies, they seem strangely determined to force AI on customers, even if it costs them money.
- ViktorRay 4mo ago
  The answer is simple. “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.” - Steve Jobs
GeekyBear 4mo ago
I personally switched to DDG months ago when Google opted me into AI search against my will.
mmastrac 4mo ago
I've weirdly found that I like the Google AI mode in specific cases, and I find that the hybrid is the worst of the two worlds. There are some cases where I don't know exactly what I'm looking for and I want the AI to curate results. In other cases, I know what I'm looking for and I want to read the OG source. The AI popup is the worst and will hallucinate answers from Reddit comments. I specifically had it ask me a nonsense question which was literally just someone's Reddit comment suggesting a follow-on topic B to the search topic A. The AI mode will _sometimes_ be useful enough to prompt into doing the search and summarization for me and get me just enough info and some links to continue the work myself.
- datakan 4mo ago
  [dead]
kriro 4mo ago
Unfortunately DDG is still horrible for non-English results. As are most "smaller" search engines. I rotate through them every now and then to try. Is there a meta search engine that uses country specific engines depending on searches anyone can recommend?
erelong 4mo ago
Ironic to me as the only DDG thing I use anymore is their duck.ai service
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
gitowiec 4mo ago
Does DuckDuckGo support -not_wanted_word syntax? I tried to use it with -shop or -pharmacy and it still gave me unwanted results
- hundchenkatze 4mo ago
  It does: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax But I guess sometimes it doesn't work?? > Please note: we are aware some of our advanced syntax isn't operating 100% correctly on all queries and are actively working on it. It is unfortunately a non-trivial issue given we get our private results from a variety of sources.
james2doyle 4mo ago
Maybe I’m a wierdo but I actually like the Brave version of their Search + AI solution: https://search.brave.com/ask https://search.brave.com/ask After switching between Perplexity, Phind, and a couple others, it seems like the best balance for my use. You can always just use the regular Brave search. It does seem to include an AI summary by default, but you can turn that off: https://search.brave.com/settings#:~:text=Make%20AI%2Dpowered%20answers%20appear%20automatically%20for%20some%20searches. https://search.brave.com/settings#:~:text=Make%20AI%2Dpowere... I find it is grounded in facts (based on the results) more and doesn’t typically make stuff up. I am usually using it for things I am more well versed in (web dev) so I have a baseline knowledge to draw from.
waynesonfire 4mo ago
very impressived with no LLM results. If I want LLM, I don't need to use a search engine to engange with it. That's a different product.
k310 4mo ago
I previously posted about DDG search results (not personalized, but as geolocated as they can) > DuckDuckGo search results, seem to be based on either crude geolocation or recent movies of similar names, bizarrely, when I search for specific technical terms. I have to qualify searches with multiple negations to get anything of interest to someone with more than high school education and interests.
chris_explicare 4mo ago
[dead]
lanycrost 4mo ago
I don't liked this AI answers in the beginning, but now they are to handy and help to not scroll and choose website by website.
techakash01 4mo ago
[flagged]

309 points by jaredwiener 4mo ago

I switched to duckduckgo last week and i am really loving it. I tried their browser but I was getting a lot of 'this browswer is no longer supported messages'. I think I will try brave next.

Fogest 4mo ago
I've been liking the Brave browser. The only thing I dislike is how many damn Cloudflare captcha's I have to go through all across the web. However in a way this may actually be a feature as I believe it shows that Brave's fingerprinting protections are actually effective. I didn't get these on other browsers as they were likely very easily fingerprinted. I did have one site which told me I needed to use Chrome, Edge, or Firefox to use their site. Which kind of made me laugh considering the engine Brave uses. It was a really interactive JS heavy training site, so I guess they really wanted to be sure the browser was compatible to avoid support issues.
Arubis 4mo ago
If you're looking for a no-AI vibe from your browser, you probably won't get it from Brave. Zen might be a better fit. If you're just trying new browsers to see what's out there and clean, I've really liked Orion.
- gattac_janitor 4mo ago
  Thanks for the advice I will check them out.
- gwbas1c 4mo ago
  Interesting. I hid the Ask Leo button eons ago when it showed up, so I never feel an "AI encroach." That being said, I've used "Ask Leo" a handful of time, with mixed results. It's really good for "Give me the TLDR" or "Find the part of the page that talks about X".
TimByte 4mo ago
If you're on macOS, take a look at Orion from the team behind Kagi Search. It runs on WebKit, is really light on battery usage, doesn't come bundled with crypto stuff or AI agents, and still supports Chrome and Firefox extensions natively

consp 4mo ago

Since google got as bad as bing, it doesn't matter anymore and ddg is fine (afaik still the main source). This is just a plus.

Carbon1603 4mo ago
Ddg is fine for me for English terms and non-work. For my search terms in other languages and work stuff, Google still can't be matched.

d_silin 4mo ago

The logical business opportunity in the current LLM-boom is to create a bunch of AI-less services and products, and then charge money to access them. Think of premium branding analogy: masses get cheap AI slop, wealthy get high quality human-curated and human-created produce. Like organic vs regular food.

king_zee 4mo ago
This is sad and dystopian, why don't companies instead make AI optional in their products?
- d_silin 4mo ago
  Among IT giants, Apple is the only such option.
Xirdus 4mo ago
This only works if your business is large enough that you and all your competitors aren't expected to have humans doing everything already, but small enough that going AI won't boost your valuation by much. My intuition is that the intersection is pretty much empty.
- d_silin 4mo ago
  Who says "valuation"? I am talking about "profits", something that none of the the upcoming IPO debutantes have managed to achieve.
  - Xirdus 4mo ago
    For the founders, IPO/merger is pure profit. They don't care what happens afterwards.
unfitted2545 4mo ago
Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism touches on this concept, where there's a constantly shifting opposition to the market that itself becomes engulfed in its own market, to be advertised. So for example all the productivity/digital detox channels and videos are themselves a consumer demand to be watched on YouTube, on phones. And now we have anti-AI products marking themselves higher for a feature that didn't previously exist. It's like the tree of capital gets split at every turn.

jerf 4mo ago

"Wait, we're getting an influx of new users, and they actively don't want us to run the most expensive part of our search results page?" Where can I find such accommodating customers myself?

cassianoleal 4mo ago
Pretty much everywhere. AI is only popular with AI providers and delusional C-suites.
- miyoji 4mo ago
  Hey, don't forget about all the programmers who are excited to help destroy their own livelihoods for no extra compensation.
  - elzbardico 4mo ago
    I think that a lot of those overly enthusiastic engineer AI fanboys are just playing a rational game driven by their perception that AI is a effective substitute for them, and that the only way to survive the comming culling is by being seen on the market as something an AI thought leader. Basically, signalling that they are going to be cooperative subjects for the enemy's occupation of the land. "I, for one, welcome our new giant insect overlords" is, IMHO, the operative meme here. Others are just addicted, the cycle of fast interaction and reward in coding agents is not very different from gambling or crack cocaine.
    - Groxx 4mo ago
      The rational game here is extremely straightforward, and even has big names like "prisoner's dilemma" behind it: Unionize.
    - hparadiz 4mo ago
      I like how everyone on HN feels entitled to a profession that hasn't even existed for 100 years and that is constantly changing. Talk about addiction.

bko 4mo ago

> Since then, traffic to DuckDuckGo has been booming. Last week, the company noted that web visits to its no-AI search page were up nearly 30% week-over-week, and its U.S. app installs were also up 18.1% week-over-week, with U.S. iOS app installs peaking at 69.9% week-over-week growth. Of course there are no absolute numbers or scale. This is just an advertisement for DuckDuckGo. It's gross that previously respected tech publications run this kind of slop for clicks

ricardo81 4mo ago
DDG used to have a graph showing the number of queries they did daily. It was around 100 million searches a day before they removed it a few years back. They were receiving bad press at the time IIRC. An educated guess is they're doing a similar number of searches today.
- dredmorbius 4mo ago
  Oh, pity, seems they did kill that. The traffic graph used to be at: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic It was originally just a raw traffic graph, see <https://web.archive.org/web/20130711215117/https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130711215117/https://duckduckg...>. By late 2022 (18 November) it was a tabular presentation without the graph, and disappeared shortly afterward: <https://web.archive.org/web/20221118045948/https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://web.archive.org/web/20221118045948/https://duckduckg...>. It's gone by 6 Dec 2022 (redirect to homepage): <https://web.archive.org/web/20221206080717/https://duckduckgo.com/traffic/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221206080717/https://duckduckg...>

ghost_pepper 4mo ago

Anyone with experience know how DuckDuckGo compares to Kagi in terms of quality of search results?

TimByte 4mo ago
[dead]
superkuh 4mo ago
It's very similar to kagi in that it only ever allows you to see 200 results per query.
Fogest 4mo ago
I just stopped paying for Kagi as I personally found I stopped using search as much now that I am paying for an AI chatbot. So I have now switched to using DDG. I personally think Kagi did often have better results. I sometimes find myself adding the `!g` bang to my search so I can get the Google search results as sometimes DDG lets me down. I didn't do this much at all when I was using Kagi. But this is also just my anecdotal experience and I haven't been on DDG for long yet since Kagi, so my perspective may not be proper yet.
anonymouscaller 4mo ago
I find DDG results to be lower quality than Kagi, have never liked Bing's index. I also frequently use the personalized site rankings feature in Kagi to strip out known junky sites
bigstrat2003 4mo ago
Far worse, in my experience. DDG was my first attempt to switch off Google, but the results just weren't very good and I frequently had to use the !g query option to get good results. With Kagi, I consistently get better results than Google.

Fogest 4mo ago

To be honest, I didn't find DuckDuckGo's AI on the top of their search to be very good anyway compared to the one Google has. However can't say I have cared much as typically if I am searching I don't want an AI response, otherwise I'd just go straight to an AI chat interface in the first place.

ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo ago
The Google one is personalized to use language and sources that you'd prefer. They're building an individual response for each person that is most suited to trick that person into clicking on their ads. For some people they dont care, but I myself dont want a digital clone of me tricking me into buying things. Salesman have for a long time teaching new salesman to use NLP tricks like matching and mirroring to convince people you're relatable and trustworthy. Google is doing this with all the data they have on you.
- Fogest 4mo ago
  Yeah for sure. When I was using Kagi for example, I had to be far more specific especially if I am looking for things that are more local such as local businesses. I personally don't mind having to do this and I knew when signing up for something like Kagi that it wasn't going to be able to use information it has tracked about me to give me these kinds of "better" search results. So at the end of the day there is a trade-off that has to be made for privacy. Sometimes I do throw the `!g` bang in there if I want to be redirected to Google in order to get those more localized/personal results and knowing I am trading off some privacy.
nomel 4mo ago
Biggest problem is that google has a near exclusive deal with reddit, so all other search engines have old reddit results [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033
- Fogest 4mo ago
  Yeah that does make sense, though I have found the DDG AI to give me some pretty misleading, incorrect, or just completely off answers which prompted me to throw the !g on the search to see what the Google AI would have given. I'm sure this is overall because of there being more training data, however I do think that is a good reason to simply not bother with the DDG AI. If the AI is going to provide mediocre or wrong answers a lot, then it seems better to just not have it. Unfortunately I have seen far too many people, especially less tech savvy ones rely pretty heavily on the AI summaries provided by the search engines. And I think it can be a bit dangerous to have these results be super unreliable in what they state. The Google one also isn't perfect, but I've at least found it's a bit more accurate. However I personally don't really care for either. As I mentioned in my OP if I already made the choice to use a search engine, it's likely because I don't care for an AI response as I could open up Claude/ChatGPT or whatever's interface and ask the question there if I just wanted AI.

mentalgear 4mo ago

Been using DDG now for years since I noticed a few years back already that its search results were at least equal, if not superior, to G00$le.

TehCorwiz 4mo ago

I've been using DDG for years and it's at least as good as Google for most general use. I still keep it set as the default search engine. For some context sensitive searches where words overlap with more common topics I have a Kagi subscription.

MeetingsBrowser 4mo ago

DDG has been my daily driver for more than a decade now and I could not be more pleased. Better privacy, good results, no drama, first search engine to include bangs, and its free!

superkuh 4mo ago

DDG would be a lot better if lite.duckduckgo.com didn't automatically block anyone who looks deeper than 200 search results as a bot and then force a JS only challenge on the lite page (that crashes old browsers). I think this false positive could be solved by DDG lite returning more than 10 results per page.

capitainenemo 4mo ago
Huh. Didn't know there were 2 non-JS interfaces. I get redirected to https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ (which is also 10 per page). I do appreciate that DDG has it at all. Google blocks all non-JS searches these days. I've never noticed the challenge, but then, I don't think I've ever clicked 20 pages into the search results either. Usually if I've clicked on a couple of pages I feel it's time to refine my query..

ceheaaf 4mo ago

[flagged]

AlienRobot 4mo ago
Replace journalism with AI summaries... of what? What is the AI going to summarize once journalism is dead?
- dotcoma 4mo ago
  Press releases, which is what too much of what we call ‘journalism’ summarises anyway.
luhn 4mo ago
> So, the "Ai is not the default" claim is bullshit Where was this claim made? Nowhere in the article says that.
Groxx 4mo ago
"AI is not the default" is not a claim made anywhere AFAICT, especially not with that wording. The only thing you could be referring to is the explicitly no-ai url, which AFAICT has no "Auto-Generated" "Search Assist" (that's kinda the point), and it also hasn't used that phrase ever that I've seen in months. So I kinda feel I have to ask: did you read the article, or did you read an AI summary?
AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
Edit: I know how to turn off the goddamn AI that’s not the point I've used DDG as my primary search and it was maddening when they put that stupid AI response thing in there last year because it was not helpful and I'm a huge advocate of AI Everything is marketing now
- rpdillon 4mo ago
  Just use http://noai.duckduckgo.com/ http://noai.duckduckgo.com/, which is mentioned in TFA.

TimByte 4mo ago

I think a lot of people aren't actually against AI itself. Personally I just want to choose when I need a chatbot and when I want a normal list of links. Over the last few years, that line has started getting pretty blurry

malfist 4mo ago
> Over the last few years, that line has started getting pretty blurry Is that because every page you land on these days is just AI slop?

marcosdumay 4mo ago

I would be way happier with the old site-specific excepts and no AI on the search results, but the AI page still a click away like it's today. DDG today has two search options, IMO, both could get some improvement.

WolfeReader 4mo ago
Can you give an example of what you're talking about? I just ran a search on an author I started reading, and the results had no AI and no obvious link to AI. Using Android and IronFox if that has an effect: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&origin=funnel_home_website&q=Christopher+Ruocchio https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&origin=funnel_home_websi...
- marcosdumay 4mo ago
  The no-ai page has no ai, no except, and no link that will bring your query to the ai prompt. DDG probably won't want the first and the last there, but the second is valuable. The normal page has a link to the ai, and used to have an ai except (IDK if it disappeared because I went to the no-ai page), but before that it used to have an except taken from the most relevant page by a set of rules. The link to ai is useful, and the old except was very useful.

feverzsj 4mo ago

"&udm=14" still works on google.

shevy-java 4mo ago

So, Google killing off google search, is probably the number #1 reason for DuckDuckGo growing - that and how AI ruins everything now. Unfortunately, whenever I used DuckDuckGo, the search results were also crap - and the User Interface was crap too. For some reason these web-searches suck, from A to Z, starting at the UI, but more importantly showing search "results" that are really qualitatively not good or inclusive. We already HAD good results - Google search used to be usable, then Google killed it off deliberately. Some inspiration Google appears to have taken from youtube, where you can search for "xyz", and it shows you "abc" instead after a while, which is horrible but not totally horrible as you may just watch another video. But for exact text search, copying that was stupid. Google ruined its search engine deliberately over several years, hoping that people will never notice it. And now we should use this crap AI garbage "search"? That is a privatized web. I refuse to help transition to private actors controlling the www. For similar reasons I do not use AMP and recommend everyone to not fall for the trap Google puts at you. Either way, someone can hopefully tell the DuckDuckGo team to offer alternatives that do not suck in their search engine. (Qwant also sucks, by the way - they just copy/pasted Google's search UI; perhaps some people want it, I don't. I want oldschool search. Simple. Stay simple. Don't clutter the UI. Don't add garbage. Don't lie to the user. And so forth.)

adregan 4mo ago

My issue with DDG AI result is that sometimes I would accidentally hit the "more" button to expand the result and it would begin a painfully slow crawl of text that pushed the results I was actually interested in further and further down the page. It was usually preferable to refresh rather than wait. So this is a welcome change.

charonn0 4mo ago
The "More" button changes to a "Stop" button when clicked.

nikhilpareek13 4mo ago

[flagged]

ChrisArchitect 4mo ago

Related: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296649

emaccumber 4mo ago

I switched to DDG search three months ago, and unfortunately it's much inferior to Google. Maybe I've subconsciously optimized my queries for Google these past 20 years and need to rethink how to query using DDG, though.

Valodim 4mo ago
Try kagi :)
capitainenemo 4mo ago
I will say it's nice to have them actually honour keywords in searches that google has made harder and harder to discover and seems to ignore at will (inurl: site: etc) The funniest one for me in google is +"foo" they decided people didn't actually mean it, so they changed it to +""foo"" - then when we all started doing that, they made the new secret "yes I really want that string" to be +"""foo"""
olyjohn 4mo ago
I dunno man. I switched years ago, and still to this day, when I get a bad set of results... I throw a g! on it, and still get shitty results.

deleted 4mo ago

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skrtskrt 4mo ago

Kagi is still by far the best results for me, particularly for engineering content and worth every dollar. DuckDuckGo results are even more frustrating than the currently-terrible version of Google for finding good information IMO.

bradley13 4mo ago

You have to ask: Why is Google pushing the AI results? You would think that this would impact their ad revenue. Since Google is fundamentally an ad company, this deserves a closer look. My suspicion - for which I have no proof - is this: With search results, Google marks the ads. The marking has gotten ever more subtle over the years, but it's there. If you want to avoid clicking on ads, you can. With AI, Google wants to integrate ads seamlessly into the results. If you search for widgets, and Acme Corp. has paid Google enough, the AI summary will praise the virtues of Acme's widgets. And the user will have no idea that this is paid placement, instead of a summary of product reviews, etc..

aexer0e 4mo ago
The simple answer is due to popular demand. I remember when people were doom-posting about how chat GPT was making google obsolete before Google introduced AI summaries, and no one has been saying that after Google introduced it.
- nitwit005 4mo ago
  There's an entirely valid concern about losing traffic to a competitor, but that doesn't make it logical to drop the old product some people still clearly prefer. Like many companies, they seem strangely determined to force AI on customers, even if it costs them money.
ViktorRay 4mo ago
The answer is simple. “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.” - Steve Jobs

GeekyBear 4mo ago

I personally switched to DDG months ago when Google opted me into AI search against my will.

mmastrac 4mo ago

I've weirdly found that I like the Google AI mode in specific cases, and I find that the hybrid is the worst of the two worlds. There are some cases where I don't know exactly what I'm looking for and I want the AI to curate results. In other cases, I know what I'm looking for and I want to read the OG source. The AI popup is the worst and will hallucinate answers from Reddit comments. I specifically had it ask me a nonsense question which was literally just someone's Reddit comment suggesting a follow-on topic B to the search topic A. The AI mode will _sometimes_ be useful enough to prompt into doing the search and summarization for me and get me just enough info and some links to continue the work myself.

datakan 4mo ago
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kriro 4mo ago

Unfortunately DDG is still horrible for non-English results. As are most "smaller" search engines. I rotate through them every now and then to try. Is there a meta search engine that uses country specific engines depending on searches anyone can recommend?

erelong 4mo ago

Ironic to me as the only DDG thing I use anymore is their duck.ai service

deleted 4mo ago

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gitowiec 4mo ago

Does DuckDuckGo support -not_wanted_word syntax? I tried to use it with -shop or -pharmacy and it still gave me unwanted results

hundchenkatze 4mo ago
It does: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax But I guess sometimes it doesn't work?? > Please note: we are aware some of our advanced syntax isn't operating 100% correctly on all queries and are actively working on it. It is unfortunately a non-trivial issue given we get our private results from a variety of sources.

james2doyle 4mo ago

Maybe I’m a wierdo but I actually like the Brave version of their Search + AI solution: https://search.brave.com/ask https://search.brave.com/ask After switching between Perplexity, Phind, and a couple others, it seems like the best balance for my use. You can always just use the regular Brave search. It does seem to include an AI summary by default, but you can turn that off: https://search.brave.com/settings#:~:text=Make%20AI%2Dpowered%20answers%20appear%20automatically%20for%20some%20searches. https://search.brave.com/settings#:~:text=Make%20AI%2Dpowere... I find it is grounded in facts (based on the results) more and doesn’t typically make stuff up. I am usually using it for things I am more well versed in (web dev) so I have a baseline knowledge to draw from.

waynesonfire 4mo ago

very impressived with no LLM results. If I want LLM, I don't need to use a search engine to engange with it. That's a different product.

k310 4mo ago

I previously posted about DDG search results (not personalized, but as geolocated as they can) > DuckDuckGo search results, seem to be based on either crude geolocation or recent movies of similar names, bizarrely, when I search for specific technical terms. I have to qualify searches with multiple negations to get anything of interest to someone with more than high school education and interests.

chris_explicare 4mo ago

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lanycrost 4mo ago

I don't liked this AI answers in the beginning, but now they are to handy and help to not scroll and choose website by website.

techakash01 4mo ago

[flagged]