Money bags over there. Paying for search engines, la ti da.

You don't say? What a shocker.

Go figure that people using an alternative search engine to avoid Google would be the kind of people wanting to avoid AI.

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.

Your "Artificial Intelligence" is reading the Slop and generating more slop. It's slop all the way down.

If you turn off all ai features in ddg, it turns them back on by itself. It's infuriating.

I don’t pay for search. Don’t be ridiculous.

My butler does it for me.

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

Things that have multiple answers like "what are good Scifi books" or "how do I write fizz buzz in c" send me to other sites.

Problem is that a casual search is already impossible because the internet is already an AI wasteland. There is mostly Reddit, Wikipedia and forums left to look for real answers. Everything else is already pages after pages of AI slob. I'm not gonna wade through this. So it's "reddit best scifi books" or I just get the AI result and take it to Wikipedia.

I'm not sure if you are aware, but "12+20," "color picker red," and "what is -40 degrees c in f" already give you the answers you want in DuckDuckGo without needing to click on a search result.