Oh no, people are leaving us because the things we did well are getting worse!
PUT MORE AI IN IT!! TRIPLE DOWN!!! KISS THE CRUSTY ORANGE BROWN RING!
I never understood the previews, AI or otherwise. Why would a company pay you for placement when the preview steals your content and puts it above your ad?
Google's AI results are what finally got me to switch my default search engine to noai.duckduckgo.
You can set it with
in your web browser settings.
Edit: posting here keeps adding a "25" after the percent sign and before "s&noai=". You don't need the number there.
You can't have % in a URL unless you have a hex octet after it. If you want to search for '%', then you need to URL-encode the %.
URL-encoded % is %25. You might have seen before that URL-encoded space is %20 (though underscore is often used for search queries).
%25 is URL encoding for %, since all the encoding sequences start with % and then have a hexadecimal ASCII code after them, 25 being %.
It is normal for it to be added and the browser just resolves %25 to % much like it would resolve %3F to ? for example
Kagi, ecosia, quant, ddg! Searxng for the nerds
I ran ddg for a while it got crappy. I’ve since moved to kagi
The idea is cool but I think I'll pass.
Pay for the product or be the product. I like having customizable search that works and isn't filled with ads and features I don't want. Or in the case of ddg, I like being able to search news and not ending up on MSN fucking constantly (because Bing)...
With that said, there's also mojeek and searx, worth trying.
Half of the time you pay for the product and you're stillthe product
Yeah those half suck. Anyway, I told myself I wouldn't shill but Kagi's privacy policy spells it out pretty clearly where they stand.
Could they one day turn around and start storing or selling user data? Yes. But they would face such a user backlash that it would end them. Their entire revenue is from subscriptions so without happy paying customers they're cooked.
Yeah DDG is really bad at filtering AI slop from the search results. You can turn the AI summaries off but 90% of the hits will often just be blogs written by ChatGPT
Google’s AI results are what finally got me to switch my default search engine to noai.duckduckgo.
Yeah I used to DDG for a good while then when they rolled out the ai (before the noai subdomain I guess), I decided that something I use 10 to 30 times in a day might actually be worth paying for and just went with a paid service that lets me turn all that off.
The important thing is to get off the goog, though. They're too big for all our good now.
I don't.
Believe it or not, this was literally their motto. If you didn't know, you'd never, ever think it was possible, right?
There was a time many tech companies were owned by idealists with fairly good intentions. Then they got rich, then they got greedy, and here we are.
You can absolutely debate whether their intentions were ever good, but that was their public face, at least. I think at least some of them meant it, personally, but maybe I'm still naive after all these years. I'm not the only one who took the statements at face value, though. Many employees at companies like Google have tried to stand for the old ideals and gotten shoved aside and/or fired.
They ruined their search engine too
They did that even before AI. Sponsored links and worse results, so people go to the dreaded page 2 more often, showing even more sponsored links and ads. And they say capitalism makes things run efficiently...
have they tried putting more more ai in it? the investors all agreed this was the best solution!
Trouble is, the web for which the PageRank algorithm was developed has long since died - its highly decentralized, interlinked network of freely available information has almost entirely been replaced by centralized, account-gated silos. Web search engines, in turn, have gotten progressively worse since long before LLMs had become computationally feasible.
much of that, both the centralization opposed to search and the search degradation to force more searches and serve more adds, like the removal of advanced search operators, was deliberate.
Duckduckgo.com Ftw
Technically they still made more money. They just made less than their projections by about a billion dollars.
Yeah, they made double-digit profits. They have been swimming in money for decades and their cash ocean is still getting bigger at an insane rate.
Revenue, however, rose 25% to an enormous $127.6bn. The figure was slightly below the roughly $128bn analysts had forecast.
Advertising revenue grew 11% to $82bn, short of expectations. Revenue from Google’s search business, still the company’s largest source of income, rose 12% to $63.4bn, slowing from 17% growth in the previous quarter.
Jesus, and that's just from selling user data and ad placements? Yeah they are never willingly moving away from that business. Investors wouldn't let them.
Thanks for posting the snip.
Jesus, and that’s just from selling user data
Technically no, at least not to other companies, that would be the dumbest thing for them to do
and ad placements?
Yeah, that's the one.
Companies like Google and Meta prefer not selling your data because... why feed their own competition? Their product is access to the ad network which has profiles on everyone. If they sell that data to competitors, the competitors can build a good ad network too (though the space it can sell isn't necessarily as premium of course).
They all will sell or even just share your data to some three letter government agencies though. Because those aren't competition.
Right I'm oversimplifying—they sell their own programmatic "insights" on user data to let advertisers more creepily target and manipulate people.
And users will never willingly move away either, so we're stuck with them getting bigger and bigger until the system collapses.
I mean some will but I get what you mean. Many people will just never pay the opportunity cost to divest themselves, no matter how far Google falls.
Aside: this is what people like us are good for. You'd better believe that everyone I know well knows that they can come to me if they ever want help degoogling, decorporatising, or otherwise exorcising their tech. Sometimes they even do.
It gets even better. The trillion dollar chatbot is not only killing the basis for search but its very own as well: All those content creators, small ones, large ones, commercial ones. They all are dying because of it, yet the chatbot needs constant feeding to stay alive, and will poison itself if fed on its own content. ... This will be fun.
What you're describing is cancer. Takes nutrition from neighbouring cells to grow infinitely ultimately destroying its own host. Kind of like AI and their constant need for water, energy, land and human data.
Not quite. Cancer can reproduce itself but it can't sustain itself. AI cannot reproduce itself nor sustain itself. Even if AI bros would like to make it look as if they were not in control of their LLM while committing crimes, they are.
Not only make less money, but literally pay money for people to engage with it for free
Google doesn't care about the profitability today. Just look at how they are integrating the AI into Maps, Android, Search and now those "Googlebooks".
What they want is for you to die, and for a whole new generation that can't interact with computers or information in any other way except a chatbot that can filter and control what they see. That's when profits go through the roof.
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