Been trying to get away from DuckDuckGo because of their support of "AI" stuff, but come on, one of these isn't even in English, and that's what I have my language set to.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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I know. I'm trying not to use DuckDuckGo because of their AI support. I was told this was a good search engine to use instead, but it often spits random stuff back at me.
The
noai.duckduckgo.comURL is important to notice in the screenshot.That's my take as well. You can also remove AI results from Google by adding the &udm=14 string to force web results only, but it doesn't absolve them of blame for how much they push AI. DDG deserves equal criticism.
It's like old Reddit. Sure it still exists, but it only gets worse and worse as they double down on the version everyone hates until the majority don't even know there's another option. And there's no guarantee they keep supporting the option that makes them less money.
Possibly, though as another commenter mentioned, using the noai URL for the moment is a good way to voice discontent. Not using it just falls into the "everyone uses google" narrative in a different way.
https://voteyesornoai.com/
If DDG's own poll didn't spell that out for them, I don't think they care.
Yeah, fair point. I wish DDG were going in a different direction.
Well that's interesting as a poll result. 👍
The article behind the link at the bottom of the site shows that this is a marketing stunt
the poll numbers are still 😇
You really do either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.
SearXNG is a mixed bag to be honest...I find that Ononoki's SearXNG delivers decent results...It's a bit mixed at times with PieFed being the third option. Some topics are surfaced better than others, so your mileage will vary with SearXNG.
Using the No AI version of DuckDuckGo sends them a message that their bet on "AI" isn't going to win them any accolades. It's an easy way to push back. As they are tracking those metrics and people can see the numbers of how many users disapprove of AI.
Bing and yahoo are VERY bad, it seems they detect that they are being used through proxies, I made another comment for what i use in searxng.
DDG's backend is really just Bing, though ...
They give different results, it seems they have different treatment to the data, which is interesting. Startpage gives different results than google, duckduckgo gives different results than bing, but on the bigger picture, a bigger sample gives the statistically optimal result??? (closer to the source truth on the most probable good result) question mark, huge number theory on statistics.
(i'm drunk)
Bing in a sandboxed session yielded results identical to DDG in my experiments.
In searxng they don't give the same results, bing brings some completely different stuff both on an selfhosted instance and on an public instance (it just gives random garbage), it seems proxying does some stuff to bings internal algorithm, as google is different than startpage on searxng.
Edit: a screenshot showing it.
Given the same methodology (search algorithm) a larger sample size gives a truer picture of what that methodology favors. If the methodology isn't neutral or doesn't bias in the same way as your desired outcome then a smaller sample size analyzed by a different methodology may provide better results.
Ah shit, I forgot to turn both those off. Ugh, I've been playing browser shuffle...Good catch!
What search engine?
It's just Bing wearing a duck hat anyway
I use brave search, in the settings you can turn off ai answer and anonymous telemetry
I'll just leave this here: https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/
Several useless slop paragraphs in that article - seems to have been written by LLM.
Human summary: Brave is a Chromium-based browser that is recommended by some for privacy. It's created by homophobe and Republican donor Brendan Eich, who was asked by several Mozilla employees to resign and led to half of Mozilla's board to step down. After OKCupid started pointing out his homophobia to Mozilla browsers users, he finally quit.
After that he created Brave with millions of dollars from amongst others Founders Fund’s FF Angel, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and Digital Currency Group.
In 2016 the "Brave Ad Replacement" was announced which would replace ads on pages with ones injected by Brave, paying in crypto.
Brave collected donations in their crypto on behalf of people like Tom Scott without asking them, and when Tom found out and told Brave to stop, Brave said "refunds are impossible".
In 2020 Brave Browser silently injected referral links into URLs of crypto wallets containing Brave's affiliate code.
By default they display sponsored images as the background for the home and new tab pages.
In 2021 Brave Browser exposed the .onion domains people visited as part of the DNS traffic so their ISPs could track users.
In 2023 Brave announced that they'd be selling their search data to AI companies, and prevented sites from opting out of this even if they asked not to be scraped by Brave.
In 2024 Brave deprecated their option for Strict fingerprinting protection.
Brave also paid for advertisement whenever users searched for "Firefox" in the Play Store, displaying "Forget the Fox", which Brave's VP (who promoted NFTs and FTX with AI) denied - meaning he was lying or didn't find out before denying it.
it seems crazy to me that people still use brave--i've been reading nothing but terrible shit about them for years
Same, been there too. Still, it's easy to miss articles on them, they only pop up once every so often. Same for Proton.
I might be a bit out of the loop, what about proton? I know they have their own AI chatbot, but did I miss anything else about them? AFAIK they are nowhere near Brave in terms of being utter garbage.
No, it's nowhere near that, still the CEO came out in favor of Trump so I had to ditch them too.
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
Thanks for the reply and source! I am not a fan of this, but not quite convinced to switch yet. May I ask what you switched to or what alternative email providers you could recommend? From my not very in-depth research, self-hosting an email server seems to be quite a nightmare.
I was weary of self-hosting email myself too, didn't want to go down that rabbit hole. After some searching, I've landed on migadu.com. I just renewed the subscription after the first year, was 19$ a year for the micro plan, which is more than enough for my needs. Not sure why they use dollars though, as they are a Swiss company.
So far no problems, have ~10 of my domains hooked up for email.
The only downside I can spot is it's bring-your-own-domain, so take that into account.
Appreciate the suggestion, I will look into it. I don't have my own domain yet, but I guess it is about time...
Nice to find an up to date article, thanks
So you know:
CEO is a anti-vaxxer anti-masker asshole, and incredibly pro-AI and pro-crypto.
Also the browser did at one point "accidentally" have a crypto farm built into it.
I'm so tired of the insistence that you have to agree with everything that the CEO does or says if you use a piece of software... You can turn off the ai and crypto in browser settings with a couple clicks. Also I'm talking about the search engine not the browser. I don't use the browser purely because the Linux builds split mode doesn't work nearly as clean as Zen, plus i prefer Firefox forks
I use it cause it's a search engine that gives good results and that can disable ai answers... Until I'm able to get my server PC finished to selfhost searxng
Edit they actually slopped up the browser to the point it's beyond disabling it. Literally just garbage
I could understand your point if they were literally the only option
But they're not.
So why choose the worst option when better exist?
And you know how money works right? The CEO gets money for your continued usage of their products and services. So by using it, you directly support all their shitty views.
I don't care what a CEO (for free software) thinks or says I care what the software does. Is the software good?... The browser no. It's complete garbage the search engine. Yeah it's pretty decent. If the CEO's garbage ideals bleed into the software like it does in the browser, yeah it's trash. The search engine like almost every other mainstream search engine has AI answers except unlike a lot of others it lets you turn that off. It doesn't skew results towards his ideals, doesn't bury results under sponsored links, Has no crypto nonsense, it's just a search engine. It's not that deep