Tack “&udm=14” on to the end of a normal search, and you’ll be booted into the clean 10 blue links interface. While Google might not let you set this as a default, if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults.
DDG only uses the web indexing from bing. There’s no AI on DDG, and the search result is created by themselves, without MS tracking or fingerprinting.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/08/duckassist/
So far this actually seems like a good, privacy respecting implementation of a chatbot. Good for those who don’t want to go the full offline selfhosted route IMO
I actually don’t think its a “bad” idea to have an AI helper like a copilot or a Gemini on my computer. But I don’t want it integrated into every system. I don’t want it to have any more access than I choose to give it each time I use it.
I can see myself making use of a sandboxed AI, installed kind of like a flatpak or an appimage. I can call it up, ask it to do something for me and if it needs access to something temporarily in order to do it, it can ask nicely and I say sure on an as hoc basis and then shut it down again.
Uh… The settings for AI Chat and DuckAssist are both on by default when you use DuckDuckGo. You can see them in Settings -> AI Features
But even activated, results don’t default to an AI chat, that’s a different beta page you have to go through intentionally. I’ve never noticed the Assist because I’m not in an English speaking region and it is not available at all for me. But the point stays, they don’t use Microsoft’s AI. They use GPT-3 and Claude.
DDG has an experimental wikipedia “AI” that pops up near wikipedia results, but theres a button you have to click manually to generate the summary AFAIK
The operator for ensuring something appeared in a search used to be “+”, but they stopped using that for some ???mYsTeRiOuS rEaSoN???
Bing increased their prices recently.