At least with Google, you can type and respond directly with the AI summary.

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%.

And I bet those 10% were willing to opt in. Fucking sloppers incapable of giving a shit about truth. They want to kill the very concept. They're literally enemies of truth. Even fucking skeletor didn't hate the fucking concept of truth.

Yes we are talking about ddg which has roughly 100 million users and put out a poll to which 175k said they didnt want AI.

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.

You can still search on search engines some searches dont even have any ads. So what feature was removed? They actively started showing worse results ok what did they do?

Search engines still search same as they did in the 2010s. They have had ads for decades. It hasnt increased you search you see an ad or two or even none.

Your replies are equivalent to AI slop. If you are going to write something please at least think about what you are writing.

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.

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.