DuckDuckGo AI Chat

Sometimes, often, I really just want to search the web. I just want to see what's out there! I have some vague ideas that I am trying to make more coherent and give sharper edges too, and I'm exploring the space those ideas fit into to see what others have done with them. Often I don't have a specific question in mind, and trying to frame my query as a coherent question will be limiting.

As another poster commented, don't take away my agency by trying to predict my intent! Better yet, don't try to force intent on me.

You're not wrong in terms of the average user's intent (they mostly don't care about the source, they care about the content), but I see this as an ethical gray area when search engines effectively offer up all this content created by bloggers without the need of the user to visit the site itself.

Phind tries to ameliorate this a bit by providing a set of links where the summarized data comes from, but most people likely won't even click on these links.

It's going to be rather demotivating when your site's traffic suddenly gets cut in half.

At this point, anybody here likely has had the privilege of being educated to prefer primary sources of information over secondary, tertiary, etc.

The indexing feature that search engines for years provided was a side-effect and benefit of the internet’s success.

There have always been challenges with this as it is not immediately clear what should be treated as “primary source” information — it takes time and skill — the user in this model is accountable for their own exploration and consumption of other peoples’ knowledge.

AI seems to be purposefully at odds with that. So, for me, the distrust and avoidance is well-placed.

That said, it’s a powerful tool that has a place in the world, but I hope it doesn’t come at a detriment to the colloquial understanding of what it means to “search the web”

Search is pretty horrible these days imo.

My main fear with AI becoming our go-to information retrieval platform is how can we be sure that the answer is objective truth without any slant? Shouldn't there be an ethical obligation that a model should not only fact check but also provide alternative theories? We lost that somewhere in journalism but we could regain that if we prioritized that the thinking and deciding still needs to occur human-side.

I really like the way this has been added to the UI. It's off to the side so I can just use DDG as God intended if I want to, but also is distinct enough that I discovered it prior to seeing it on HN. It makes it clear this is done in a DDG private way (which is one of the things I'm wary about with ChatGPT on its own) and offers multiple models/vendors in one place.

Pretty good! Thumbs up from me.

Why ddg is not focusing on improving or innovating the search ? DDG dosen't even have lens/goggles yet . Can't ddg just try to innovate like marginalia/kagi/Occam.

If you could stuff all webpages to a vector database and give us a nice RAG that just responds to questions about anything that could be found on Internet while generating links to the source, that would be even awesomer!

This you-know-better-than-me mindset is why all technology is converging to garbage. I can't speak for OP, but for me, you are half correct: I am indeed ultimately searching for answers, but I want the piles of web pages for an hour, and that is how I will find my answer. I don't like it when systems remove my agency by believing they can correctly predict my intent. (They can't.)

There is an inverse relation between sites with ads, and sites that contain useful information that require time to look through. Open access journals, StackExchange, product support messageboards....none of these have ads.

In fact, it's the sites peddling trivial BS that are chock to the brim with ads.

The issue is LLM’s also generating the web results. Garbage in, garbage out. The real problem is maintaining the ability to find the ground of real knowledge.

management and investors wants AI chat; coincidentally it appeals to the lazy and less-intellectual

I'm a current Kagi subscriber and agree the search is excellent. Unfortunately Kagi is also wasting their time on AI bullshit, so I suspect it's a short-lived oasis.

This feels like a corpspeak non answer to the serious question above. This move will increase operating costs by a considerable amount. Is the company sufficiently profitable that it can eat the loss or is this a gamble that culminates in a PE takeover? I get that duck duck go is in a tough position since LLM search is increasing popular among users, but without a business model that balances out this feels dubious. E.G this is the marketing campaign before everyone is going to be herded into the paid tier Privacy Pro?

The first steps towards DuckDuckGo assuming a paid business model. Love it!

I really wish they named the paid service DuckDuckPro

I didn't know they have a "Pro" offer. I wish Kagi has something similar. It's quite expensive paying 10 bucks for search results only.

Honestly I doubt it.

Considering the speed at which models are improving, and more importantly, the speed at which models have begun improving per unit compute, I would bet that AI models at least as good as ChatGPT 3.5 will be free to use like this forever.

Right now there is so much interest/demand, and so much money sloshing around to provide it, that it's easy to find.

By the time the AI market cools off a little bit, I would expect that the cost to run a model meeting the current quality of ChatGPT 3.5 will be next-to-free.

Will near-state-of-the-art models be free forever? Absolutely not. But state-of-the-art circa late 2022 models are probably the quality basement, and free models will be at least that good.

As a user I dislike this kind of temporary free products. It feels dishonest and unreliable to me.

> (for example, your IP address) is obfuscated from underlying model providers

> so your personal information (for example, IP address) is not exposed to them

Is this not two different things? The first one saying that the IP address is changed in some way to make it unidentifiable. The second one is saying it's just not sent.

This is a "strangely specific denial"

Metadata that contains PII is not shared.

No mention of just data with PII, i.e. your chats.

That’s a pretty disingenuous framing. Obviously the content of the communication- what you ask the chatbot - can totally be personally identifiable, and is stored.

You aren’t providing communications content privacy, you’re providing a meta data proxy which is not remotely the same.

DDG never pretended to be unbiased. They have all the same policy decisions around artificial boosting/throttling as google without the tracking.

In their golden era search engines were essentially super sophisticated keyword matching. Users used to find novel websites from passionate people. Now it's becoming more of a social media feed of the same 100 website where you train it what you like.

This is exactly why search is so vulnerable to disruption from LLMs.

>From sharing user data with Microsoft

Citation? I can't find this.

>to hiding websites in search due to political bias

This is a gross mischaracterization. Every search engine down weights domains and pages with bad or inaccurate information. Their entire purpose is to find good information, not penis enlargement 4 u .ru pages.

You're getting downvoted pretty heavily. Do you have sources for that? I did a quick search on Kagi and couldn't find anything to support what you say.

Everyone has the same agreement. Duck duck go is grasping at straws here because their business model is completely crushed if they don't have a privacy upper hand or a competitive product. They will be forced into a pivot they can't succeed in.

The messaging could be more clear, but is this substantively different from how search queries are handled when DuckDuckGo forwards them to Bing? Bing doesn’t know who made the search but could log the query itself.

That's one way of looking at it. Another way is that your PII like your IP hitting a MS server and searches being returned for that searcher are heavily correlated. They can't serve results like https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=shops+near+me&ia=web and return shops within miles of me without passing that info on.

IIRC they pass the /24 of your IP, but all the same, not much better.

We plan to upgrade Claude Instant to Claude 3 Haiku in the coming weeks.

The first three, usually. PVC is extremely common in plumbing and drainage, and there the type of pipe is usually specified by material type, not use case. PVC cloth is less common, and I'd guess you'd qualify with a use case. ("pvc cloth for sewing"; it's often called "vinyl" instead).

Anyway, it's an intentionally hard query. I tried "tourism in mountain view, ca" first. They both do fine (though DDG doesn't provide links), since there's enough on the internet about that for the base GPT-3.5 model to recall it without additional context.

I presumed it was a wrapper around an existing model and not a new one

While Brave Search does include AI search results, they also include Leo in their browser which is a full chat interface as well. Baked right into the browser and sidebar.

You didn't answer the question. Who asked for the bullshit to be added?

My complaint isn't about more models in fact, it's about not depending on OpenAI (and not feeding them with data and money), so I would rather have less models (just llama3) rather than more

It really does show the absurdity of the current discourse around sex and gender when the definition of woman is considered to be "inflammatory political speech".

Your own post constitutes "inflammatory political speech".

So you're saying the results are political?

Most people would not care, once a brand name is established it can sell out and continue to profit for at least 20 years or more.

Proof is just about any footwear or fashion brand you care to think of.

It’s just a Bing wrapper with Bing ads. What is there to sell?