It's in the article, and why ddg is making the overtures to school admins.

Whoa, no, I haven't...

Too bad duck duck go duck duck went about 2 years ago. It's now an ineffective search engine.

You can put AI to "on demand", and it should be the default mode IMO.

I basically never want AI summaries. On top of using 10x energy it's basically just Wikipedia's first paragraph with extra steps.

This isn't the slam dunk win y'all are making it out to be. The school sysadmin only has to change the search engine option to DDG and continue on with Google otherwise.

MY default engine is duckduckgo until have a better or same level decentralized search engine

in schools, i feel like learning how to use AIs and search engines is important. also learning why to avoid them

At least you can turn it off.

I take it you haven't heard that Google is talking about banning schools from accessing search if they refuse AI?

This has always seemed ridiculous to me since they make no-AI searches not even the default, right? There are plenty of search engines that literally have no AI option.

I don't really mind the AI per se. My objection is to the implementation of it where the first returned result is in fact an AI summary which I didn't in fact ask for.

If I search the term lug nuts it's probably because I want to buy some, and not because I want to summary of what they are. It must be such a waste so much water every time they do that, only for me not read it.

Google's AI policy is to ban schools that don't use AI.

THE YEAR OF THE DUCK

I would prefer that, but presumably they think it’s a way to generate revenue. Given all the options for search out there, it’s much closer to ideal than many others.

shouldn't it be off by default?

If you allow a cookie, you can turn off ai and ads in settings. If you don’t allow a cookie (or for a private window), you can visit https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ and it has ai turned off.

I think Duck Wings is their line of menstrual pads

I use them and like them as a search engine. I just with the noai version was the default, and if they must have an AI version, it be opt in.

I wouldn't put much faith in human values either tbh

I get commercials for their AI search.

I also use their non-AI search.

It seems valid to bring this up when they are trying to become the standard for some schools.

I would like to believe that they are above board, but I do not believe anything about corporate values, because corporations are not people. (And even the agendas of people can change. Looking at you, Andy Yen, Proton CEO.)

Go, Duck Duck, go.

Their search is opt-out of AI in settings, instead of google's approach of always on, and you can also use noai.duckduckgo.com to avoid configuring settings.

Their filtering out AI results is hit or miss, but at least they do provide an option to exclude some of those results.

I thought they still use (and push for) AI

Cue the introduction of Duckbooks, and a suite of office tools like Duck Doks and Duck Wings (for spreadsheets).