Re: DDG AI convos "aren't used for training".

They can't be sure of that. The models themselves could be logging prompts and outputs for training or whatever reason. Only question is if they value those logs, though they could just have their LLM curate them to filter out low quality ones, if the space is even an issue.

that is on level that i meanwhile believe 90% of people can't handle or even understand

You don't even need the website. I just set the default search engine to DDG in my browser.

A search app makes zero sense to me.

There are too many damn apps already imo, but apparently some people like having as many as possible

DuckDuckGo said U.S. app installs went up 18.1% week-over-week on average during the May 20 to May 25 period, compared to May 13 to May 18. The company said that growth was sustained for six consecutive days and peaked at 30.5% on May 25. On iOS, the rate of install is even higher, with week-over-week growth hitting a 33% average, peaking at 69.9%.

From Chrome to DDG browser likely. Google also have a website but people still install Chrome for it, the lastest AI thing might be the final straw for people to finally looking for the alternative

I think DDO has its own Firefox fork.

While their first party browser convinced me if it's privacy capabilities, I need extensions (yes, recognizing that makes me much more fingerprintable) so I use their browser less than 1% of the time.

However, I have subscribed for their premium Services because I already trust their anti-tracker on my mobile devices and they have sufficient number of VPN nodes to be useful to me (I do miss Mullvad, and probably will use them when I'm traveling International, but it is getting harder to find good nodes and they don't have servers in south Korea at all, either).

And their measures to make a neutered and neutral AI interface is the first time I've ever paid for general AI access, finding it's helped some of my efforts as AI has been a necessary component for building my home studio and mini rack. I'm scared that my brain has already been ruined, acclimating to Google's integration of Bard and then later Gemini, and I make a regular exercise of hunting for sites that have articles or discussions that will help me work through tech projects and puzzles "the hard way" with just vanilla search queries and amendments.

I love that DDG's tech stack seems to play well in the general broader ecosystem, so it's my search engine of choice for all of my Gecko/Fusion browsers (Fennec, WaterFox, LibreWolf, and occasionally, full-fat vanilla Firefox).

I had really thought I could grow into using Kagi but I couldn't make it make sense for myself. When you're limiting paid subscribers at the first tier to 300 general web queries a month, and i could consume that many just on correcting my own typos and re-searches alone, DDG was a better investment for me for the time being.

TL;DR - I love that these guys play well with others, so I'll even pay for the access because I need them to still exist in a decade.

While I do appreciate this, their search results aren't great. I hate to say this, but even with horrible AI forward results, Google still returns better and more relevant results. I'll still use ddg first but it generally leaves me wanting.

We've come full-circle. I used to download .html pages so I could browse them while offline. Now websites install themselves so they can browse you while offline.

Too many people are brain hostages to the idea that apps do everything and you need an app for everything, even though most of the things are just websites. But all the apps are really doing is spying while they deliver their version of the website.

I "love" when the wrong technology is applied.

On the the dawn of the smartphones Mozilla tried to enter the space with an FirefoxOS and the pitch was that every app was just a website just more tightly integrated with the phone. The problem is that all the web stack is wonderfully resource hog and at the time phones were super underpowered running websites were not optimized in a browser that were not as optimized as today. So it was a terrible choice for the time being.

Other good one was Android early days. They choose Java as the default app environment and development. It kinda makes sense to use it if you want the same program to run on different platforms, the problem, again, it runs worst and with the underpowered devices of the time everything was a slog. And they doubled down on the mistake by using a garbage collector that doubled the memory usage of every app. The cherry on top, at least in hindsight is that arm was and still is the de facto Android plataform, greatly disminishing the advantage of using Java/JVM. And today Google enabled apps with native code optimized for specific plataforms, but everyone only care about ARM so of you try to run Android like in an Intel laptop a lot of apps are not compatible.

End of rant.

I thought it meant changing your default search engine.

I never considered that it was an app.

There's a DDG privacy first browser on Android. This is probably what they are referring to.

It’s a browser.

Google literally redesigned their search engine to be worse so that you would scroll through more ads to find the results you want. On average, the best result now is the fifteenth result.

Same here and I recently purchased a degoogled Fairphone 6.

Same.

I let the default fall to DDG on some of my machines. I find they're a better experience for 80% of searches. The rest are not handled well by any modern search engines and only Google in verbatim mode (and surprisingly Kagi) come close to delivering good results for those. I hope DDG improves and the team there sees the market forces that are essentially driving customers towards them. We don't want AI shit, just good, non-evil, search.

but at least you get the option to turn it off

That's also an option with google, you know.

The thing that is hilarious about this is that DDG is powered by Bing. 😂

Now? It's been better than Google for a while. Google's results have been bad for a long time.

Searxng is cool but I find myself needing to constantly tweak the container, Google keeps blocking access

This was my thought when I briefly reinstalled the browser, the AI mode seems very similar to what google announced at their I/0 con

Duck it, we'll search it live

But I like that it has that toggle at least

It's great it even has a toggle.

You can use https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ to avoid AI all together.

Good thing it takes one click to disable and it's right in your face too

Search for an item get a "19 best options for item in MAY 2026", click, blurb & amazon links!

I don't even mind people summarizing into they've found elsewhere, but like you said it's the most basic information—it's the opposite of summarizing, it's whipping up this lexical froth of bullshit filler around a tiny kernel of a factoid.

Meandering nonsense exactly. Just plausible enough for you to keep reading, and probably impressive to someone who doesn't know the domain, but as soon as you try to logically put together what you've read it falls apart.

Just ignore anything written the last two years basically