Combo it with Ublock Origin and use their AI site blocklist.

DuckDuckGo actually tries to downrank them. It's just that there's no way ts tell for sure, especially for computers.

I still go to Google for image search unfortunately.

What makes me suspect them having an agenda behind all their self-marketing is the fact that this isn't already the default page...

I honestly can't find anything on google anymore. I barely use it at all, but sometimes someone will hand me their phone, so I'll give it a shot. I always end up switching to ddg before I find what I'm looking for.

There might be a way to use google search these days but its apparently beyond my desire/skills to learn it.

Google entered heavy enshittification stage and honestly… it’s sad to watch.

google has been in heavy enshittification for going on a decade now.

Honestly you could make the argument that its been on the enshittification slide since they tried to expand out from just being a search engine company.

There is a good article about how it happened: The Man Who Killed Google Search by Ed Zitron

You put wrong URL into the second one.

There is ecosia, although they also use the US indexes

Qwant is French. Not a privacy search engine and looks like it features AI now. Kagi is really good, but US based and expensive. I think most of Europe does intelligence sharing with the US ("14 eyes" or something like that)?

Having trouble adding this as the default search in Firefox.

Anybody know the search query needed to use this from the address bar?

https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/q=%s

Does not seem to work.

Does it work as well as Google before it became absolute shit?

I'm sure the search engines log the IP, and with enough searches could be correlated back to you fairly easily even if you host it on a VPS? Unless it does some kind of mitigation I'm unaware of.

or "Degoog", which is an alternative that works pretty good as well: https://degoog.org/

yeah that's what I'm saying

Yeah same here. The results are still good though

Edit: and no I haven’t tried that

https://duckduckgo.com/settings#aifeatures

Have fun!

Note: These settings are stored in your cookies and if you clear those, the settings will reset. That's why we have https://noai.duckduckgo.com/.

So don't click it then?

If you are really that bothered by it:

.ai-searchbox_modeSelectorWrapper__GA6Ii, .header_aiChatButton__HbhQV {display: none !important;}

OR use SearXNG.

Yeah, although "no ai" is the real differentiator from the competition so it makes sense for them to keep it now it's taking off.

What they really need to do is add a much easier way to find "no ai" from the main home page, as at the moment you wouldn't know it exists. You can toggle duck ai off, but it doesn't make it clear you're now seeing the no ai version.

Don't they have duck.ai?

They should try not being Bing