this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
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AI is the future of search and I dont see anyway that changes. The user experience of AI search is way to good, average users love the summary at the top of their search. Almost every report i've seen shows over 50% of people using AI for search and that tracks with what I see in people i know in real life.
I'm a DDG user and I do not want them to handicap themselves to pass a purity test.
Of course they do, 50% of the users don't fucking know how to disable it or that you can change search engine
Because it's not possible to search without there being an AI summary
No these are not reports that count someone viewing an AI summary on google as using AI for search.
Didn't google actively degrade their search engine to force more adverts in. and I should imagine a further degradation since AI summery to make us more dependent.
I'm looking forward to when AI fully closes-in, people are deskilled and the key holders are able to pump coercive non explicit adverting into AI, we won't even realize we had been sold something we didn't already want /s
Their AI is terrible
Ai search results are ass
Asses are cute sometimes. They can also be great for sex!
Neither virtue possessed by "ai" search results.
Then opt in. We shouldn't have to opt out to avoid padding the AI numbers.
Its a generalized product targeting average people. Average people dont care AI/No AI they want the results and they use the AI summaries. If DDG hid it then they would just think it doesnt exist and go use google which provides them faster more convenient results.
Also, in my experience people who dislike AI features are often more tech-savvy in my experience. And tech-savvy people tend to know "hidden" subdomains such as "noai." and how to change the default engine's URL string whereas non-savvy tend to not know that.
So even if the majority would be against these AI features it might make more sense to make AI the default and noai opt-in. Because you'd lose more non-savvy people having no-AI as default than you lose tech-savvy people with having AI as default (I assume).
We’re talking about the same duckduckgo that had a huge poll about this right? The only data point that exists regarding what people want is that of the 175,354 users who took the poll, only 10% wanted AI features.
Yes we are talking about ddg which has roughly 100 million users and put out a poll to which 175k said they didnt want AI.
And I bet those 10% were willing to opt in. Fucking sloppers incapable of giving a shit about truth. They want to kill the very concept. They're literally enemies of truth. Even fucking skeletor didn't hate the fucking concept of truth.
Thought terminating cliches are the future of online discourse.
Search engine companies went out of their way to make normal searches worse, and then introduced AI search to keep you on their sites.
I thought everybody at this point understood enshittification at this point, but if not: of course a project at the first stage of enshittification acts better than a different product at the third stage of it.
Its not a thought terminating cliche if you didnt cut the next word out. You can argue if AI is the future of search, I think there is a strong case that its proven very good at general information retrieval.
How did search engine companies go out of their way to make normal searches worse? I search I get relevant results and its been that way for the past 20 years. Nothing has changed that has made search worse than it was 5 years ago. The only change is that people have recently gotten a choice between a google search or a chatgpt question and they were increasingly choosing chatgpt. fast forward to current day and that divide has only increased.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching
This used to be a bare bones version of what you could do on literally every search engine. I had a high school class about this. 50/50 whether you got a 'business' teacher who didn't know how to open PDF or the librarian who'd go on digressions about information theory and optimal solutions.
In the late 2010s google followed immediately by other large search engines started removing these features and actively showing users worse results so they would do more searches and get shown more ads.
Your shit won't fly here, slopper.
You can still search on search engines some searches dont even have any ads. So what feature was removed? They actively started showing worse results ok what did they do?
Search engines still search same as they did in the 2010s. They have had ads for decades. It hasnt increased you search you see an ad or two or even none.
Your replies are equivalent to AI slop. If you are going to write something please at least think about what you are writing.
I do a lot of searching, both for my day job and for personal use.
Search engines are shit nowadays. The first page of results is consistently either a list of copy pasted llm-generated nonsense, or like reddit posts from 4-5 years ago.
I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that they have gotten measurably worse even just looking back, say, 18 months. To the point they are barely usable nowadays.
It seems hard to believe that this wasn’t on purpose in order to peddle their stupid llm chatbot, when it happened so consistently at the same time.
Not saying search engines weren’t getting worse before, but it was cranked up to insane levels recently.
Do you think its because there is a lot more spam and SEO than 10 years ago or do you think google is actively doing something to remove relevant results from searches?
Personally I actually like the A.I. summaries… IF it shows its sources. That way it essentially acts as it should, a summary of the search results, and I can click the link that actually is relevant to what I wanted to find in the first place. It skips that step where you have to open the first 5 links and comb through them to find which one is the useful one.
I know most people don't click those links and just trust the summary directly, but it's important to me personally. Unfortunately those links only appear sometimes, often you just get plain text with no links.
On DDG you get the sources its summarizing from. Im not sure about google, i dont use it.
Its wrong though. Its wrong so fucking often. There's no way to fix that. I stopped using ddg because of this. Pandering to right wing idiots does not necessarily mean being smart, that's thatcherite Nazi coddling lies.
Ignoring the schizo half of your question, what would be an acceptable error rate for you?
That's relative to the confidence with which its presented. Ten results on a page? I dunno. Only one of them needs to fit, and I can refine my search or check page two.. Or used to be able to, before they disabled those features.
A statement at the top of the page? Pretty fucking low. Variable depending on topic, some as low as 0%.
Get fucked sloppy. You're ruining the world and replacing critical infrastructure for the sake of dystopian bullshit that might collapse at any moment. You're going to have been cheer leading it along. I hope you end up homeless and hungry-a lot of other people will, but you'll fucking deserve it.
How is a summary at the top of the page different from the first result? If you are fine with the first result being incorrect I dont see why you wouldnt also accept the summary to be sometimes wrong. There are still 10 results for you to pick from and infinite pages to scroll through.
If it depends on the confidence do you need them to put a disclaimer? If I'm looking for something important I'm going to actual documentation and skipping the summary even when its correct. But if I'm just searching for something low stakes and the summary answers my question I am happy to not dig any further and I consider it to be an improvement on the search experience.
These days its pretty accurate. I rarely come across a summary thats incorrect. Mostly I see incorrect summaries on searches where i already know I'm going to get a lot of wrong answers and have to sift through sites and old posts.
Okay you can't be discussed with. Am I even talking to a human being? Are you asking grok for arguments? Arguing with sloppera is pointless. Everything it's saying is disingenuous missing the point or shows fabulous ignorance.