Go figure that people using an alternative search engine to avoid Google would be the kind of people wanting to avoid AI.
You don't say? What a shocker.
Luckily there's https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
Wow, people rage baiting about an issue that already has a fix. Why am I not surprised?
It should be opposite though. They should keep the top domain AI free, and introduce a subdomain with AI.
As far as I can tell, the top domain does not use AI by default, and you have to toggle it. Even the top level summary article is just a wikipedia article rather than an AI summary. It seems they experimented with the AI for a bit, and after feedback like that given above, adapted to the desires of the community. You can fully turn AI options off too, if even the sight of "search assist" or "duck.ai" buttons you can click is despicable to you.
If you turn off all ai features in ddg, it turns them back on by itself. It's infuriating.
Just tested a few searches on the top domain in a private window with no setting changes. It looks like some search terms invoke the AI and others don't, so that explains some differences people are seeing. I saw no change in behavior between desktop and mobile.
As someone who actually likes AI (local open models only though), I agree it needs to be off by default in all cases purely on the grounds of energy usage.
AI integration is almost never due to public demand.
Thus, most of the eco-harmful data center usage is for providing answers that are ignored.
(the ai being crammed down our throats is solely due to all of the billionaires who desperately need to discredit blackmail videos)
This was from months ago. I thought it was weird when I saw the title I thought are they doing a new poll? But no this articles from January. Believe me everyone on Lemmy saw this when it first happened.
It should never be by default. I like the way Kagi handles it, you have to invoke it.
Money bags over there. Paying for search engines, la ti da.
I don’t pay for search. Don’t be ridiculous.
My butler does it for me.
I switched to Kagi too. Definitely worth $10 to be able to search with some sanity again.
Here's hoping it lasts for a year or two before falling to enshitification or google.
Does Kagi have its own Index? Or is it just masking Google/Bing like DDG or Startpage?
They use a mixed index with a lot of different sources. (mentioned here)
They have direct licensing deals with Mojeek, Brave, Yandex, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Apple, and Wolphram Alpha, which they claim is under "FRAND" ("Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory") terms, with them retaining the ability to "reorder and blend results." (which is kinda their whole thing)
As for Google and Bing, they have to use third parties to get their search data, since:
Bing: Their terms didn’t work for us from the start. Microsoft’s terms prohibited reordering results or merging them with other sources - restrictions incompatible with Kagi’s approach. In February 2023, they announced price increases of up to 10x on some API tiers. Then in May 2025, they retired the Bing Search APIs entirely, effective August 2025, directing customers toward AI-focused alternatives like Azure AI Agents.
Google: Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.
They also run their own "Small Web Index", which prioritizes smaller sites, independently operated personal blogs, comic sites, small YT channels, things like that.
You can see some of that index on its own here. I don't often see it pop up for a lot of my searches, but I'd say maybe 1 in 20 to 1 in 50 of my searches have something that is clearly ranked from there higher in my search results, that I actually end up clicking on, that is almost always more reliable than all the other sources on the topic. It's usually most prevalent for programming/system setup related terms since there's a lot of programmers and sysadmins with their own personal blogs.
I've found they rank fediverse sites higher than Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia do, though I don't know if that's just their general search ranking or if that's part of the smallweb index. Again, usually much more relevant and useful than other sites or even Reddit when they do appear.
Thanks a ton! Super insightful.
I wish they'd add a non-subscription-based plan. I'd like to just buy a pack of searches and not have to worry about them expiring.
Summary created by Smart Answers AI
My dude, read the room.
The AI is autistic
The type of ai I want in a search is one that runs on the indexing to detect ai slop written sites and drops them to the bottom of the search results.
The type of AI I want one that runs locally and blocks ads. But it blocks them pretending that they showed correctly and feeds useless bullshit to trackers.
Is anyone working on that?
I just want to know if pineapple is poisonous for my dog. I don’t need paragraphs upon paragraphs of slop about what a dog is, what poison is, what a pineapple is, a hallucinated history lesson on how dogs came to be, the nutritional benefits of fruits in general, then ending off with how apples are not only safe for humans to eat, but they are delicious as well.
Send these websites to the shadow realm.
This is the sort of information that is fucking impossible to find nowadays. There was a sweet spot from like 2001-2016 where you could easily find a reliable answer to that sort of question
This is pre "ai" as it's now being sold. Machine written websites written to hit search results, an enshitification I noticed particularly around 2021, becoming ubiquitous.
You nailed the trajectory of these now worthless articles though, and quick answers are now removed off of the search page, AI summaries only providing them, to force us to use it unless we want to wade through machine written garbage articles.
I refuse to use ai like that, they can eat dick (more of it.)
Ironically, the AI summary solves this exact problem in many cases. “How do I do ?” — “You do to achieve ” — “Oh, right” (closes the tab instead of reading about the history of ).
Of course, I wouldn't trust it with life-altering situations, and neither would I trust random blogs. I'd consult some kinda dog-oriented WebMD.
This is why I use AI for search now. Even with Kagi most of the results are massive hunks of either AI or human generated slop, so I might as well just generate the slop myself and get something more concise, and when the AI does do search it can filter through the bullshit a lot faster
Your "Artificial Intelligence" is reading the Slop and generating more slop. It's slop all the way down.
The slop it generates is more useful that the slop it reads though, and there aren't really many places that aren't slop nowadays
The SEO spam was bad before AI. AI just made it worse.
I hate it, it has made every photo and piece of art a chore for me, I obsessively check over and over I wait for death
And yet it’s on by default.
I use DDG. I know I can turn off the AI summaries, but sometimes they’re useful for gaming stuff.
Most of the time the ai answers are atrociously wrong. I'd rather search around then see lies, tyvm.
I don't even trust ai to tell me the release date on movies...
I would push back on the "most of the time" claim. I know people hate AI, for a variety of reasons, but saying it's wrong most of the time is just flat out false.
Probably 1 in 50 searches, I find that AI adds some value. Nothing that I couldn't work around, but it can save 2 or 3 additional searches and sometimes it gives better links than the main search does.
Usually my searches are good enough to give me the answer in the first few results.
Whenever I see AI pop up and I don't need it, I just feel like it's a huge waste. I do have it turned off on DDG.
The AI generated search blurb is annoying but easy to scroll past (I usually use a cookieless browser so the dismissal option doesn’t work from session to session). What really annoys me are the AI generated websites that pop up as search results. All of them are formatted basically the same so it’s easy to spot after clicking in, but that wastes a lot of time vs previously being able to just scan the preview text.
If you use DDG, set up a search source with the url https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ Then you can have no ai and no cookies.
This worked! Very excited to stop having to see that, thanks!
In case anyone else runs across this I chose “add a search engine” in my browser and used the address above plus “search/?q=%s” and it works like a charm:)
For me, I only use AI search if I can't find the answer I'm looking for in the first page of the results and I'm good with accepting a "guess" over a definitive source.
On Kagi with AI off by default it's a matter of just appending a ? to the end of my search query. I have done this 3-4 times in total. I average about 1,000 searches/month.
My sister is part of the 10%. The fucked up thing is that she's not an idiot. But she truly believes that AI in search is a net benefit. I just don't get it.
It certainly adds convenience when you want quick answers. But the road to dystopia is convenient.
It's wrong so often that it just adds useless padding I have to scroll down from, since I always have to look it up myself to get the correct info anyway.
I agree but the ethics prevents me from doing it.
Exactly my point.
I sort of get it. If AI was 100% accurate like Google search used to be, then yeah AI might be a net benefit.
But right now, they fucking tell us ”Hey this feature that gobbles up gigawatts of electricity and gallons of water might be wrong so double check it by going to the sources I've left here."
What value is that providing exactly?
Jfc...
Estimating that Google search used to be 100% seems like a really big stretch.
Better, yes.
AI search has helped me find quick answers to some mundane things like how many grams in a cup so I can see some mild benefit there, but it’s still not something I feel like I need to find those answers. I’d also never trust it looking up anything important.
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