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.
For what it’s worth, DDG recognized this immediately.
They dipped their toe in AI search, felt the pushback, and went all-in on putting toggles and immediately accessible opt-outs everywhere. They put a filter for AI images (and I hope they do the same for AI SEO spam).
In other words, they actually leaned in and listened to their own users. Unlike the soulless vampire on a throne Google has become.
While their first party browser convinced me if it’s privacy capabilities, I need extensions (yes, recognizing that makes me much more fingerprintable) so I use their browser less than 1% of the time.
However, I have subscribed for their premium Services because I already trust their anti-tracker on my mobile devices and they have sufficient number of VPN nodes to be useful to me (I do miss Mullvad, and probably will use them when I’m traveling International, but it is getting harder to find good nodes and they don’t have servers in south Korea at all, either).
And their measures to make a neutered and neutral AI interface is the first time I’ve ever paid for general AI access, finding it’s helped some of my efforts as AI has been a necessary component for building my home studio and mini rack. I’m scared that my brain has already been ruined, acclimating to Google’s integration of Bard and then later Gemini, and I make a regular exercise of hunting for sites that have articles or discussions that will help me work through tech projects and puzzles “the hard way” with just vanilla search queries and amendments.
I love that DDG’s tech stack seems to play well in the general broader ecosystem, so it’s my search engine of choice for all of my Gecko/Fusion browsers (Fennec, WaterFox, LibreWolf, and occasionally, full-fat vanilla Firefox).
I had really thought I could grow into using Kagi but I couldn’t make it make sense for myself. When you’re limiting paid subscribers at the first tier to 300 general web queries a month, and i could consume that many just on correcting my own typos and re-searches alone, DDG was a better investment for me for the time being.
TL;DR - I love that these guys play well with others, so I’ll even pray for the access because I need them to still exist in a decade.
Until real Americans take their country back from the corrupt pedophile protecting “administration”, I mostly avoid US search engines altogether.
Still I prefer ecosia
‘just duckduckgo it’
Duck it, we’ll search it live
I can’t find anything I’m looking for on Google anymore. It’s not a search engine, it’s just ads.
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.
The thing that is hilarious about this is that DDG is powered by Bing. 😂
yep, me too. you can put “-ai” at the end of your search to shut off the slop, but it’s a PITA. Often I’ll just go to DDG.
I use duckduckgo for simple searches and google when it’s something more complicated. I don’t like google tho, too nosy and too much ads.
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.
Check out yacy, its not well polished but at least it doesn’t rely on major search engines afaik (p2p)
The problem with your own searxng instance is that your searches across other engines come from your IP address.
So if you’re searching for something, everyone knows it’s you using IP triangulation. Google then tracks you around the internet.
If that doesnt bother you, OK great.
You could install a proxy to expose their IP instead of your i guess
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
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.
Last time I tried I had issues but it was quite a while ago. Do you know a good guide or something you can post?
I hate to say it, but I just had Claude generate the guide. The docker container is the easiest way I think.
“install” websites, i’ll never understand
I thought it meant changing your default search engine.
I never considered that it was an app.
Everything is an app.
We’ve come full-circle. I used to download .html pages so I could browse them while offline. Now websites install themselves so they can browse you while offline.
In capitalist America, the content watches you!
I “love” when the wrong technology is applied.
On the the dawn of the smartphones Mozilla tried to enter the space with an FirefoxOS and the pitch was that every app was just a website just more tightly integrated with the phone. The problem is that all the web stack is wonderfully resource hog and at the time phones were super underpowered running websites were not optimized in a browser that were not as optimized as today. So it was a terrible choice for the time being.
Other good one was Android early days. They choose Java as the default app environment and development. It kinda makes sense to use it if you want the same program to run on different platforms, the problem, again, it runs worst and with the underpowered devices of the time everything was a slog. And they doubled down on the mistake by using a garbage collector that doubled the memory usage of every app. The cherry on top, at least in hindsight is that arm was and still is the de facto Android plataform, greatly disminishing the advantage of using Java/JVM. And today Google enabled apps with native code optimized for specific plataforms, but everyone only care about ARM so of you try to run Android like in an Intel laptop a lot of apps are not compatible.
End of rant.
Too many people are brain hostages to the idea that apps do everything and you need an app for everything, even though most of the things are just websites. But all the apps are really doing is spying while they deliver their version of the website.
I just searched earlier and DDG had a link telling me to try its AI (I think it was on my mobile on firefox). At least it didn’t force it, I guess.
DDG is not too bad, but when I click the sources from the AI search results, they often don’t contain the info from the search summary, so why even have it if it’s mostly a hallucination?
Because:
🎇 ✨ +10 Line go up! 🎇 ✨
I hate that ddg has “show AI images” on by default
It’s great it even has a toggle.
But I like that it has that toggle at least
Ironically, duck.ai is also the only AI provider I use because on top of having multiple models available, it has no login requirement so I just ask whatever stupid question and be on my way.
Shoutout to https://uruky.com/
It’s a paid private search engine.
https://theprivacydad.com/interview-with-the-engineer-of-uruky-a-private-search-engine/
Trying them out right now, so far so good!
I appreciate their comparison to Kagi also notes Kagi’s strengths.
