Tack “&udm=14” on to the end of a normal search, and you’ll be booted into the clean 10 blue links interface. While Google might not let you set this as a default, if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults.
It’s easier to just use duckduckgo
I just wish I could search a term of more than 2 words and get relevant results rather than pages that contain at least one of the words in high volumes. That’s the only reason I ever use google, for years now. Encasing the words in quotes doesn’t seem to function at all on DDG, either.
I’ve found that search engines in general, including Google, really don’t like to listen to the whole thing I typed in.
Google still listens to quotation marks, at least.
Won’t take it for granted. Has worked for a decade or more but who knows how much longer.
It’s worked since basically the launch of Google as a search engine.
Should’ve doubled up on my decade estimate!
DDG has had cost issues with some of the more complex queries. Exclusions (-) for example are very expensive, as Bing recently raised their prices. I think this is why search has gotten worse with DDG recently.
heh to find my comment with these screenshots:
I had to use Google:
Here are the same queries with Kagi (I was interested to see the difference)
Nice, how about for an odd emoji someone just used elsewhere (but then Voyager ran out of RAM I think):
Here (didn’t find the right one, almost)
Third and fifth result are about the correct one
I was gonna ask if your OS displays 🧑🧒 in color, or if you were searching a different emoji.
Less than two hours later, Google forgot how to find the right emoji!
Regarding my pondering, now I see Emojipedia moved the by-platform Emoji icons to the Designs tab.
In the meantime I learned Wikipedia redirects 🧑🧒 to “Family” :)
Yeah the colors come from the os, my keyboard shows the monochrome one when I pick it. That was all very interesting!
With the Microsoft AI.
DDG only uses the web indexing from bing. There’s no AI on DDG, and the search result is created by themselves, without MS tracking or fingerprinting.
DDG has an experimental wikipedia “AI” that pops up near wikipedia results, but theres a button you have to click manually to generate the summary AFAIK
The operator for ensuring something appeared in a search used to be “+”, but they stopped using that for some ???mYsTeRiOuS rEaSoN???
Bing increased their prices recently.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/08/duckassist/
So far this actually seems like a good, privacy respecting implementation of a chatbot. Good for those who don’t want to go the full offline selfhosted route IMO
I actually don’t think its a “bad” idea to have an AI helper like a copilot or a Gemini on my computer. But I don’t want it integrated into every system. I don’t want it to have any more access than I choose to give it each time I use it.
I can see myself making use of a sandboxed AI, installed kind of like a flatpak or an appimage. I can call it up, ask it to do something for me and if it needs access to something temporarily in order to do it, it can ask nicely and I say sure on an as hoc basis and then shut it down again.
Uh… The settings for AI Chat and DuckAssist are both on by default when you use DuckDuckGo. You can see them in Settings -> AI Features
But even activated, results don’t default to an AI chat, that’s a different beta page you have to go through intentionally. I’ve never noticed the Assist because I’m not in an English speaking region and it is not available at all for me. But the point stays, they don’t use Microsoft’s AI. They use GPT-3 and Claude.