Salesman have for a long time teaching new salesman to use NLP tricks like matching and mirroring to convince people you're relatable and trustworthy. Google is doing this with all the data they have on you.
Unfortunately I have seen far too many people, especially less tech savvy ones rely pretty heavily on the AI summaries provided by the search engines. And I think it can be a bit dangerous to have these results be super unreliable in what they state. The Google one also isn't perfect, but I've at least found it's a bit more accurate. However I personally don't really care for either. As I mentioned in my OP if I already made the choice to use a search engine, it's likely because I don't care for an AI response as I could open up Claude/ChatGPT or whatever's interface and ask the question there if I just wanted AI.
To turn off AI features of DDG, top right pancake icon -> settings -> AI features -> off
After switching between Perplexity, Phind, and a couple others, it seems like the best balance for my use.
You can always just use the regular Brave search. It does seem to include an AI summary by default, but you can turn that off: https://search.brave.com/settings#:~:text=Make%20AI%2Dpowere...
I find it is grounded in facts (based on the results) more and doesn’t typically make stuff up. I am usually using it for things I am more well versed in (web dev) so I have a baseline knowledge to draw from.
Where can I find such accommodating customers myself?
In most companies executives can bypass processes to make projects happen - when done well that allows long term investment to happen when the business case is too complex to reduce to an RoI - when done poorly you end up launching a lot of pet projects that have no market and never will. I feel uniquely positioned to have a good understanding of the maluses and benefits of authoritarian project creation from all three angles and the best solution I've seen is to let it happen but bring down the hammer if things get too absurd.
We had to decide whether or not to drag our pet to an after hours emergency vet, with all the associated stress and cost, or ignore the AI result and go off everything else we were reading. It's one thing to dismiss AI answers that seem wrong when it's a domain I know well or the stakes are low, but this was not that type of scenario.
In the end we opted to ignore google's AI and fortunately it was absolutely the right call. So, thanks google.
So, at the end of the day Google's AI is better than ye olde Google Search, and ye olde Google Search is now very difficult to accomplish because of how much Google has poisoned the well. Kagi is excellent but most normal people can't stomach paying for search when there's a "free" alternative so your options are Google's AI, Google's Search or and alternative search - most normal folks don't realize non-Google search alternatives exist (outside like Bing) so Google's AI ends up capturing a lot of usage.
There's a difference between "linking to a source that may be incorrect" and "you providing the text that's blatantly wrong", and Google seems too big to care about it.
Those particular bits on nonsense seem to have been stopped for now, but let's not fall prey to Gell-Mann amnesia. The only problem Google has fixed is "our LLM was hurting our reputation in this specific case". They have not, and likely cannot, fix the underlying problem.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/why-googles-ai-cant-spell-...
The PR is "Its magic!"
So people try to treat it like magic, and don't like when it detonates a fireball in a room that is too small.
Not requiring technical knowledge is the selling point. That it doesn't need you to think.
I suspect the only real answer is an economic one, Something like Kagi, where hopefully by paying for results you change from being the product to a customer and this is incentive enough for them to provide good results.
People call it hallucinating. I think it is lying. Google etc.. became a huge liar. All those AI slop companies are lying to the people now.
I find that those "AI summaries" google tends to use by default, are hallucinating liars. I stopped wasting my time with this AI slop spam in general. Any "human" still using AI and targeting me, gets perma-banned without any further discussion. I kind of need ublock origin for EVERYTHING. (Ublock origin is great, but I need this on every level, blocking AI slop spam, blocking Nate's donation-daemon nag-widget for KDE and so forth - ok, the last one is easy to disable, just patching out the part where Nate thinks it is ok to harass people, but for AI slop spam from external sites I need something more effective than ublock origin, kind of like an ublock colossal shield.)
I think it's reasonable to assume that Google artificially nerfed its search engine before they pushed so massively for AI.
If people are just naked copy-pasting that field... which, ugh, of course they are... they are doing themselves and others a disservice.
I don't think either of these sentences is true.
> Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?
I didn't say anything about a moral line, I just said that there are a lot of programmers who are very excited to remove themselves from being employable. I didn't even say whether I thought that was good or bad!
Basically, signalling that they are going to be cooperative subjects for the enemy's occupation of the land.
"I, for one, welcome our new giant insect overlords" is, IMHO, the operative meme here.
Others are just addicted, the cycle of fast interaction and reward in coding agents is not very different from gambling or crack cocaine.
Many developers even seem to predict an increase in demand in the medium to long term as AI written systems increasingly begin to need human attention.
I think the hyper enthusiastic ones are more vocal, but there's a quieter and larger group who are somewhat more measured about it.
What the fuck do you expect? That people just cheer a brave new world of diminishing salaries and disappearing jobs along with some vague promises that every thing will be alright?
How many people here got rich by automating away the jobs of others? I mean, what is this? Others are fair game, but programming is sacred? That's quite simply the peak of absurdity.
It's pretty funny seeing this play out in the HN comments because I never got any consideration before when I had to learn new frameworks and languages. But suddenly machine learning is the line one should not cross? Playing the world's smallest violin right now.
The result of most software has been "you do basically the same job except now you do it on a computer"
Unionize.
thats a lot of c-suites
(or the anti-ai crowd is more vocal than the occasional chatgpt user)
but its also obviously not true that "AI is only popular with AI providers and delusional C-suites.
Company replaces phone support with AI chatbot, then says "Call center interactions dropped 80%! People must really love our AI bot," even though they were given no other choice.
AI features are popular in the sense that people are using it. I think the popularity lessens when asked if people want these features.
My point being that people who visit chatgpt.com/claude.com/etc by their own free will are not the same as people who now have to use AI summaries on Google because they are just showing up there and making the ten blue links harder to find.
i hate unsolicited ai in my software as much as the next guy. but it’s silly to claim ai isn’t popular just because you don’t like it.
anything else with 50MM subscribers would reasonably be called “popular”.
Furthermore, where did that number come from? What does "active" mean? What does "user" mean?
https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
weekly and monthly active users are common industry terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_users
my comment is not in support of google's ai search. or ai in general.
just pushing back on "ai is not popular", because it is obviously popular by any reasonable metric.
I don't think anyone who works in product management at any company in 2026 understands this, so you're not alone.
by any reasonable metric, ai is popular. that doesn't change just because you super-duper hate it.
your insistence that i dont understand something unrelated to the point of my comment is weird.
All these anti-Google, anti-facebook, anti-Instagram, anti-OpenAI, anti-Claude stories are exactly that. Provide copium and feel good for a handful of people for a few days.
My suspicion - for which I have no proof - is this: With search results, Google marks the ads. The marking has gotten ever more subtle over the years, but it's there. If you want to avoid clicking on ads, you can. With AI, Google wants to integrate ads seamlessly into the results. If you search for widgets, and Acme Corp. has paid Google enough, the AI summary will praise the virtues of Acme's widgets. And the user will have no idea that this is paid placement, instead of a summary of product reviews, etc..
Like many companies, they seem strangely determined to force AI on customers, even if it costs them money.
“If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.” - Steve Jobs
The AI popup is the worst and will hallucinate answers from Reddit comments. I specifically had it ask me a nonsense question which was literally just someone's Reddit comment suggesting a follow-on topic B to the search topic A. The AI mode will _sometimes_ be useful enough to prompt into doing the search and summarization for me and get me just enough info and some links to continue the work myself.
Is that because every page you land on these days is just AI slop?
DuckDuckGo results are even more frustrating than the currently-terrible version of Google for finding good information IMO.
Better privacy, good results, no drama, first search engine to include bangs, and its free!
The funniest one for me in google is +"foo" they decided people didn't actually mean it, so they changed it to +""foo"" - then when we all started doing that, they made the new secret "yes I really want that string" to be +"""foo"""
For some context sensitive searches where words overlap with more common topics I have a Kagi subscription.
DDG today has two search options, IMO, both could get some improvement.
DDG probably won't want the first and the last there, but the second is valuable.
The normal page has a link to the ai, and used to have an ai except (IDK if it disappeared because I went to the no-ai page), but before that it used to have an except taken from the most relevant page by a set of rules.
The link to ai is useful, and the old except was very useful.
Think of premium branding analogy: masses get cheap AI slop, wealthy get high quality human-curated and human-created produce. Like organic vs regular food.
So for example all the productivity/digital detox channels and videos are themselves a consumer demand to be watched on YouTube, on phones. And now we have anti-AI products marking themselves higher for a feature that didn't previously exist. It's like the tree of capital gets split at every turn.
I did have one site which told me I needed to use Chrome, Edge, or Firefox to use their site. Which kind of made me laugh considering the engine Brave uses. It was a really interactive JS heavy training site, so I guess they really wanted to be sure the browser was compatible to avoid support issues.
If you're just trying new browsers to see what's out there and clean, I've really liked Orion.
That being said, I've used "Ask Leo" a handful of time, with mixed results. It's really good for "Give me the TLDR" or "Find the part of the page that talks about X".
But I guess sometimes it doesn't work??
> Please note: we are aware some of our advanced syntax isn't operating 100% correctly on all queries and are actively working on it. It is unfortunately a non-trivial issue given we get our private results from a variety of sources.
But this is also just my anecdotal experience and I haven't been on DDG for long yet since Kagi, so my perspective may not be proper yet.
Of course there are no absolute numbers or scale. This is just an advertisement for DuckDuckGo. It's gross that previously respected tech publications run this kind of slop for clicks
An educated guess is they're doing a similar number of searches today.
The traffic graph used to be at:
https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
By late 2022 (18 November) it was a tabular presentation without the graph, and disappeared shortly afterward: <https://web.archive.org/web/20221118045948/https://duckduckg...>.
It's gone by 6 Dec 2022 (redirect to homepage): <https://web.archive.org/web/20221206080717/https://duckduckg...>
DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
I've never noticed the challenge, but then, I don't think I've ever clicked 20 pages into the search results either. Usually if I've clicked on a couple of pages I feel it's time to refine my query..
Unfortunately, whenever I used DuckDuckGo, the search results were also crap - and the User Interface was crap too. For some reason these web-searches suck, from A to Z, starting at the UI, but more importantly showing search "results" that are really qualitatively not good or inclusive. We already HAD good results - Google search used to be usable, then Google killed it off deliberately. Some inspiration Google appears to have taken from youtube, where you can search for "xyz", and it shows you "abc" instead after a while, which is horrible but not totally horrible as you may just watch another video. But for exact text search, copying that was stupid. Google ruined its search engine deliberately over several years, hoping that people will never notice it. And now we should use this crap AI garbage "search"? That is a privatized web. I refuse to help transition to private actors controlling the www. For similar reasons I do not use AMP and recommend everyone to not fall for the trap Google puts at you.
Either way, someone can hopefully tell the DuckDuckGo team to offer alternatives that do not suck in their search engine. (Qwant also sucks, by the way - they just copy/pasted Google's search UI; perhaps some people want it, I don't. I want oldschool search. Simple. Stay simple. Don't clutter the UI. Don't add garbage. Don't lie to the user. And so forth.)
First 'graph of TFA.
The specific URL "noai.duckduckgo.com" omits any AI summaries, generators, chats, or prompts, as advertised.
The unqualified page, www.duckduckgo.com, does include AI features at present. But that's not what's being claimed.
So I kinda feel I have to ask: did you read the article, or did you read an AI summary?
What is the AI going to summarize once journalism is dead?
You're doing these in the wrong order.
Why this OP specifically? Because he is strongly reacting to the article's claim that "Ai is not the default" ... which is not stated or implied by the article he's replying to.
The article is a useful bulletin that DDG has a "no AI" function, previously accessible via a URL and now through extensions as well. OP is acting like DDG is claiming to be an anti-AI company, based on nothing stated in the article.
Take this response to a comment of mine for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48144461. I've read the article and someone thought I didn't because he didn't see the connection I saw and acted all righteously, almost as this threads OP.
So in order to avoid embarrassing yourself online it's always nice to first give people the benefit of the doubt and then avoid being sneaky and clever when communication what you want.
I've used DDG as my primary search and it was maddening when they put that stupid AI response thing in there last year because it was not helpful and I'm a huge advocate of AI
Everything is marketing now
Everyone is aware of this new marketing URL now
Click the gear on the Search Assist box, and click the bottom option that says "Never". Right beneath it, it says: "Completely disables Search Assist".
It's always been easy to avoid DDG's AI, which was the point of my comment.
Where was this claim made? Nowhere in the article says that.