DuckDuckGo made sunglasses that do absolutely nothing, and they sold out
https://www.techspot.com/news/113357-duckduckgo-made-sunglasses-do-absolutely-nothing-they-sold.html
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· in reply to @XLE@piefed.social
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
I maintain that this should be the default behavior and the AI be opt-in
I would argue a good 99% of what we experience in life should be opt-in and yet here we are. Use of AI, companies getting our data, etc is all opt-out meanwhile organ donation is opt-in. Wtf.
Folks can configure this as their homepage, search engine, etc.
When you use the site for the first time and search something where AI overview is available, it shows a toggle for how often you want to see it, with “sometimes” as middle ground being the default. Without showing that a feature exists, it’s hard to decide if you want to use it or not. And since peoples opinion about it seems pretty spit, I think that is pretty valid.
Or would you rather have a cookie-popup like choice box pop up every time you use the service without cookies enabled asking you for your preference? Because that would annoy me very much.
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.
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.
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.
What’s neat about an open poll like the one they ran is that it includes most of the people who care about weighing in. Maybe you can read an AI summary about statistically relevant sample sizes? It might be more useful to learn about the math, or to skip the summary and find a useful website, like this calculator from Qualtrics that will show you that a sample size of 175,000 is more than 10 times what you’d need to achieve a roughly 99% level of confidence with a 1% margin of error.
Yes that is a good sample size but its biased by the people weighing in caring most about the issue. If it was 175000 users sampled randomly from the DDG user base then yes it would be a good predictor but it wasnt.
You're assuming that everyone who didn't answer the poll is for AI, not exactly a good assumption considering the poll results.
Im not making that assumption at all.
You're constantly arguing that the sample is so strongly skewed against your position that the proportion of people who want AI is over 4 times (!) as much as in the sample. "Everyone" is an exaggeration, but the point remains. If you believe the sample is that skewed, then you have to provide evidence.
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.
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).
Maybe im to tech-brained but I dont think its a technical barrier. I think that they just dont care enough. One search of “how to remove AI from DDG” would bring it up but they never care about the issue enough to take that first step.
I sometimes observe this with my family members, who will complain “oh I dont like how it does X” and I say you can turn that off in the settings and then they dont. It was a minor complain they had but not an actual complain they wanted to solve.
Maybe DDG should do the firefox route of a popup to disable all AI for new users.
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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.
Bad faith slopper lies. Why bother to copy-paste? What are you using to generate BTW.
None of what ive said is AI generated. You’re just a moron.
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Ai search results are ass
Asses are cute sometimes. They can also be great for sex!
Neither virtue possessed by “ai” search results.
Of course they do, 50% of the users don’t fucking know how to disable it or that you can change search engine
People are intentionally going to LLM chatbots to search. This is not including viewing of AI summaries as AI 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
Having a search algorithm be AI based and having an LLM summary of “the web” is two completely different things.
DDG provides both because its what users expect from a search engine now.
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.
I’d say most people don’t really care
Most people are idiots.
As mostly a person I’m offended!
As an idiot, I am too!
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If enough people were that bothered about a box with an AI overview, it wouldn’t be there. Simple as that. The thing is that the overview turns out to be helpful in some cases, despite what the haters think.
Recently, my mom killed one of her plants, because she searched for something to use as organic fertilizer and the ai summary suggested to add coffee grounds mixed with water daily. She realized it was a fake information and isn’t trusting anything from internet searchers anymore. I wonder if at some point it will happen to most non-tech people, and search usage will go down heavily.
Coffee grounds can be helpful to add to fertilizer, but you need more than just coffee grounds: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11241280/
This being partially right is probably exactly how it ended up in the training data. But AI is too dumb to understand which parts are relevant/important.
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Settings > Search > Search Engine > DuckDuckGo
(Firefox) Settings > Search > Default Search engine > Add search engine or select one of the offered ones
Idk about Chrome and the other Chrorium based ones but should be as simple, if not, then you should first think about using a better browser