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DuckDuckGo made sunglasses that do absolutely nothing, and they sold out (www.techspot.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 93 points 3 months ago (61 children)

I maintain that this should be the default behavior and the AI be opt-in

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    This comment is unnecessarily dismissive and unhelpful.

    If people don't care, then they won't care if it's gone either. And that's the better option.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Recently, my mom killed one of her plants, because she searched for something to use as organic fertilizer and the ai summary suggested to add coffee grounds mixed with water daily. She realized it was a fake information and isn't trusting anything from internet searchers anymore. I wonder if at some point it will happen to most non-tech people, and search usage will go down heavily.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Coffee grounds can be helpful to add to fertilizer, but you need more than just coffee grounds: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11241280/

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago

    I would argue a good 99% of what we experience in life should be opt-in and yet here we are. Use of AI, companies getting our data, etc is all opt-out meanwhile organ donation is opt-in. Wtf.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    (Firefox) Settings > Search > Default Search engine > Add search engine or select one of the offered ones

    Idk about Chrome and the other Chrorium based ones but should be as simple, if not, then you should first think about using a better browser

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  • [–] -4 points 3 months ago* (46 children)

    AI is the future of search and I dont see anyway that changes. The user experience of AI search is way to good, average users love the summary at the top of their search. Almost every report i've seen shows over 50% of people using AI for search and that tracks with what I see in people i know in real life.

    I'm a DDG user and I do not want them to handicap themselves to pass a purity test.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    Almost every report i’ve seen shows over 50% of people using AI for search

    Because it's not possible to search without there being an AI summary

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (4 children)

    then how do they count it? home else could someone be counting "AI usage in the search engine"?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    I checked again to get a more up to date report and so that we actually have something to go off instead of my memory of some random reports. Pew finds 50% of people use chatbots and the most common use is searching for information. Also in the report the have a stat for reading AI summaries at the top of a search and that is 60% say that have, 10% dont know and 30% dont read it. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/

    So its fair to say I was wrong and its not over 50% but its close to 50%.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago (12 children)

    Then opt in. We shouldn't have to opt out to avoid padding the AI numbers.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (11 children)

    Its a generalized product targeting average people. Average people dont care AI/No AI they want the results and they use the AI summaries. If DDG hid it then they would just think it doesnt exist and go use google which provides them faster more convenient results.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago* (8 children)

    We’re talking about the same duckduckgo that had a huge poll about this right? The only data point that exists regarding what people want is that of the 175,354 users who took the poll, only 10% wanted AI features.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    What’s neat about an open poll like the one they ran is that it includes most of the people who care about weighing in. Maybe you can read an AI summary about statistically relevant sample sizes? It might be more useful to learn about the math, or to skip the summary and find a useful website, like this calculator from Qualtrics that will show you that a sample size of 175,000 is more than 10 times what you’d need to achieve a roughly 99% level of confidence with a 1% margin of error.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Yes that is a good sample size but its biased by the people weighing in caring most about the issue. If it was 175000 users sampled randomly from the DDG user base then yes it would be a good predictor but it wasnt.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (3 children)

    You're assuming that everyone who didn't answer the poll is for AI, not exactly a good assumption considering the poll results.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    Im not making that assumption at all.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    You're constantly arguing that the sample is so strongly skewed against your position that the proportion of people who want AI is over 4 times (!) as much as in the sample. "Everyone" is an exaggeration, but the point remains. If you believe the sample is that skewed, then you have to provide evidence.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Thats not what I'm arguing. I'm saying most people dont care enough either way and based off research and polling ive seen that most people do use the features. So if most people use them and only a tiny fraction wants them gone you should keep them default and give those people a toggle.

    When I'm saying 175k out of 100m I'm pointing out that its a tiny % of the user base. The people who were engaged enough to vote in that poll were the anti AI people. It was posted to all the anti AI subreddits and twitter feeds. It was a big call to action to try and prove no one wants it.

    Its obviously where search is heading which is why ddg mentions in their blogs that they are working heavily on AI features. They have always been receptive to users so unlike google so they do give users the option to disable. If they had data that most were disabling we'd see that be the default.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Also, in my experience people who dislike AI features are often more tech-savvy in my experience. And tech-savvy people tend to know "hidden" subdomains such as "noai." and how to change the default engine's URL string whereas non-savvy tend to not know that.

    So even if the majority would be against these AI features it might make more sense to make AI the default and noai opt-in. Because you'd lose more non-savvy people having no-AI as default than you lose tech-savvy people with having AI as default (I assume).

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Maybe im to tech-brained but I dont think its a technical barrier. I think that they just dont care enough. One search of "how to remove AI from DDG" would bring it up but they never care about the issue enough to take that first step.

    I sometimes observe this with my family members, who will complain "oh I dont like how it does X" and I say you can turn that off in the settings and then they dont. It was a minor complain they had but not an actual complain they wanted to solve.

    Maybe DDG should do the firefox route of a popup to disable all AI for new users.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (8 children)

    AI is the future of search

    Thought terminating cliches are the future of online discourse.

    The user experience of AI search is way to good

    Search engine companies went out of their way to make normal searches worse, and then introduced AI search to keep you on their sites.

    I thought everybody at this point understood enshittification at this point, but if not: of course a project at the first stage of enshittification acts better than a different product at the third stage of it.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching

    This used to be a bare bones version of what you could do on literally every search engine. I had a high school class about this. 50/50 whether you got a 'business' teacher who didn't know how to open PDF or the librarian who'd go on digressions about information theory and optimal solutions.

    In the late 2010s google followed immediately by other large search engines started removing these features and actively showing users worse results so they would do more searches and get shown more ads.

    Your shit won't fly here, slopper.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Its not a thought terminating cliche if you didnt cut the next word out

    "Of"? I assume you mean the next two words, but not only doesn't it change anything, I think it makes my response match even better. So I added them to the quote.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Didn't google actively degrade their search engine to force more adverts in. and I should imagine a further degradation since AI summery to make us more dependent.

    I'm looking forward to when AI fully closes-in, people are deskilled and the key holders are able to pump coercive non explicit adverting into AI, we won't even realize we had been sold something we didn't already want /s

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago* (8 children)

    Its wrong though. Its wrong so fucking often. There's no way to fix that. I stopped using ddg because of this. Pandering to right wing idiots does not necessarily mean being smart, that's thatcherite Nazi coddling lies.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    Ignoring the schizo half of your question, what would be an acceptable error rate for you?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    The acceptable inaccurate result rate is 0%. I think that’s unachievable by LLM tech.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    No search will ever give you the correct answer 100% of the time so I dont know why you'd draw such a dumb line in the sand.

    I mean unless you dont use search engines, don't use libraries, don't talk to humans.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (3 children)

    How is a summary at the top of the page different from the first result? If you are fine with the first result being incorrect I dont see why you wouldnt also accept the summary to be sometimes wrong. There are still 10 results for you to pick from and infinite pages to scroll through.

    If it depends on the confidence do you need them to put a disclaimer? If I'm looking for something important I'm going to actual documentation and skipping the summary even when its correct. But if I'm just searching for something low stakes and the summary answers my question I am happy to not dig any further and I consider it to be an improvement on the search experience.

    These days its pretty accurate. I rarely come across a summary thats incorrect. Mostly I see incorrect summaries on searches where i already know I'm going to get a lot of wrong answers and have to sift through sites and old posts.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    how is summary at the top of page different from first result

    Okay you can't be discussed with. Am I even talking to a human being? Are you asking grok for arguments? Arguing with sloppera is pointless. Everything it's saying is disingenuous missing the point or shows fabulous ignorance.

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