Somewhat ironic given that DuckDuckGo has AI on by default. You have to either save the settings on the cloud or manually turn off AI when searching using DuckDuckGo. Still a good privacy search engine though.
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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You can have it off by default and not use a saved session if you add a custom search to the browser with https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s as the URL (or thereabouts, I'm typing from memory). (the %25s is just %s, I don't know why lemmy is adding that...)
Good to know! But the out of the box version of DuckDuckGo.com does have AI on by default. I think it should be off by default.
Agreed
Wait, it has a quick blurb on by default but actually interacting with it requires an opt in. That seems like a good balance.
In fact doing a search now (duck is my default) it doesn't even offer an ai answer unless I click it first.
I wouldn't call it private as from my experience it uses browser fingerprinting to target users.
Ironically, I left DuckDuckGo and switched to Kagi when DDG announced their AI.
Doesn't Kagi use AI as well now though?
Yep, the Kagi Assistant. I think you can turn it off but like DDG it's on by default.
Performative.
No idea if it's how I have things saved but DDG is just enough AI for me. If I want AI to answer a stupid question without making me bother with shitty SEO spam, great! If I want to find a site, I can! Not costing me anything near as I can tell.
I'm happy enough with DDG. Your use-case will vary.
But what about all the AI slop in the web results?
It does also have the option to filter AI generated images from search results.
I don't actually do all that many image searches. I'm usually searching for text based pages, and those results have also gotten super terrible, but this doesn't seem to have any impact on that.
Their AI is only useful because the quality of search results has gotten so bad.
"Let's mitigate AI hate by putting in more AI!"
The AI is actually fairly useful and can be disabled.