I'd rather have AI results than to associate myself with the French

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I recently used google for the first time in ages. "This bs sucks" was my first reaction. My understanding ist that we are slowly being trained (or callibrated) by the search engines we use.

In any case, you are expecting to get maps directly from the search engine? Why you dont just look for what you want directly in google maps? Silly automation is what made google rubbish.

No, they're not, but they are one of the better-known alternatives to Google, and they do advocate privacy. This, in itself, is a good thing and should be promoted.

The problem is that Google's monopoly on web search is so large that using Google is the de facto standard for the vast majority of people. Getting them to acknowledge that there are alternatives to Google benefits privacy on the internet more than DDG having contracts with MS harms it.

Yeah I'm not a big fan of DDG either... it's powered by Bing so hardly surprising it isn't great. And Microsoft isn't any less evil than Google.

Presearch is the best I've found - just a nice, basic search - but it's a little slow and has some cryptoshit background so I'm open to alternatives. Ecosia is greenwashing bullshit afaik.

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.

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

Duck it, we'll search it live

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.