DDG has a noAI portal that filters out AI images and doesn’t bother you with summations and things. it’s available at noai.duckduckgo.com and you can add it as a separate search engine to Firefox thusly.

  • LOGIC💣@lemmy.world
    1·
    16 days ago

    I’m going to say something spicy here, but for me personally, I’ve found DuckDuckGo’s AI search summaries to be quite useful. Not for the actual AI summary text, but for the links they give, which are often better than the normal search results.

    That being said, I could easily do without them.

    • RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      16 days ago

      As I said elsewhere, the problem is in fact that search engine providers deliberately make their search results worse to push AI usage. This keeps the user entirely under their control and at the same time hurts the websites the AI training data was stolen from, because no one will bother to visit them any more. I’m not saying DDG does this, but they get their search results from other search engines where this is the case.

      • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        0·
        16 days ago

        Well I’m so glad you asked!!

        You’re looking at one in the screenshot. Firefox does this, as does Chrome and some other browsers as well.

        A bookmark keyword is a tiny bit of text that you can configure your browser to treat differently when you use it in the location bar.

        Typically, whatever you type into the browser location bar will either treat that text like a website you’re trying to go to (like “apnews.com” or “ www.wikipedia.org ”) or text that gets sent to a search engine (like “tasty dinner ideas” or “best white socks”). However, if the text you enter starts with a bookmark keyword you’ve set up, the browser will insert the rest of the text you entered into a website address in a specified place.

        This is typically useful to speed up searching on specific websites.

        So if you want to search Wikipedia for “particle physics”, you can go to the Wikipedia website and enter “particle physics” into the search box and click the search button. That would send you to a page with search results of the text you entered. If you look at the location bar, you should see a URL that looks like this:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=particle+physics

        What we notice here is that the text you entered, “particle physics” is right there in the URL.

        To turn this into a bookmark keyword, you create a bookmark to this search results page, then replace your search term with the characters “%s”, so the bookmark URL would look like so:

        Then, in the “keyword” box, you can enter whatever text you want to use for this shortcut. For Wikipedia, I like using just the letter ‘w’. (You don’t need quotes around it.) Save the bookmark, and that’s it.

        Now, whenever you want to search Wikipedia, all you have to do is type “w particle physics” or “w forest fires” or “w whatever” into the location bar and the browser will take you directly to the search page with those results.

        You can do this with basically any website with search functionality: search engines, retail stores, news, IMDb, reference resources, whatever.

        This feature also can be used for going to detail pages directly if you have a specific reference number.

        So let’s say you’re at work and you have a trouble ticketing system that shows details of ongoing issues. The URL for ticket number q-rt-654321 might look like this:

        https://troubletickets.mycompanyfoo.biz/ticket/q-rt-654321/view

        So if you had the ticket number handy (like from an email chain), you could create a bookmark keyword to go directly to the ticket detail page:

        https://troubletickets.mycompanyfoo.biz/ticket/%s/view

        …and use the keyword “tt” for trouble ticket.

        Now you can just type “tt q-rt-654321” into the location bar and go right to the detail page (presuming the ticket number is accurate).

        And that’s it.