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.
…Installs?
Do they know there’s a website?
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%.
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.
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/bangsO_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
that is on level that i meanwhile believe 90% of people can’t handle or even understand
I just wish they had their own web crawler instead of relying on Microsoft’s
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)
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.
Unfortunately the internet will still enshittify with a speed we cannot yet imagine
My friend just told me ddg is now better than google search
Now? It’s been better than Google for a while. Google’s results have been bad for a long time.
‘just duckduckgo it’
Duck it, we’ll search it live
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.
I like Duckduckgo been using it a while, they have a tor based search page as well which is another thing I like.
Wouldn’t say they are anti-ai but at least you get the option to turn it off.
Wouldn’t say they are anti-ai but at least you get the option to turn it off.
Best you can hope for these days, really.
The phone app I use to turn my lights on and off is now calling itself an “AI life assistant” and has an AI prompt box front and center that I can’t get rid of. But at least I can ignore that and still use the real function. Which, to be clear, is a fucking light switch. I use this app exclusively for turning a single light on or off. It does not need a LLM ‘assistant’ built in. But that’s just what you get these days – it’s shoved into everything.
Apparently I’m the Luddite here for sticking with the light switch on the wall that has always just worked. ;p
I exaggerate slightly, I guess. It turns the light on and off and also changes colors.
It’s definitely possible to do color changing LED lighting without an app. Half of my room is lit that way, and I love it. But it’s more expensive and more complicated to install, so when I went for a second light, I just went with the app-controlled bullshit.
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
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”
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.
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)
Thats depressing. % stats like this always oversell it. There are probably not many people installing duckduckgo so a 30% increase is a small handful of users. I’d expect like 500% if there was actual pushback.
Unfortunatly there will not be an actual pushback, because most people will always prefer convinience above almost anything else.
Even facts.
I know so many people who will use ChatGPT fully knowing it might be wrong. They dont care.
Scary, right?
50 million+ installs on Android, so it’s not a tiny number.
Thats way more than I expected when I made the comment and I think that changes my opinion on it being a small amount.
If you use the Voyager app, you can turn on “Always use reader mode” in the settings. It strips away the JavaScript and you won’t see those annoying messages.
It works it 95% of the articles, but there are a few that still have issues.
Thank you for this. 🩷
Edit: not that Apple is a huge turd and it seems you must use safari for this work work on iOS
I need to get a Linux phone
Editx2:
Incredible. I’m dine with the internet today.
I never bother to disable AI in duckduckgo so I just use a search engine that doesn’t have it out of the box
Thank you for making me discover unwall !
