Bro you guys are freaking out too much about AI. I mean a lot of companies are pushy about it but DuckDuckGo is not. There are actually quite a lot of use cases for me personally where AI can be really useful. DuckDuckGo is not Google or Microsoft. Chill out guys
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Couple months ago, I learned that duckduckgo has settings about disabling AI content. Settings>AI features.
Easy as that.
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At least they have an AI-free option, as annoying as it is to have to opt into it.
On a related note, it's hilarious to me that the Ecosia search engine has AI built in. Like, I don't think planting any number of trees is going to offset the damage AI has done and will do to the planet.
Well, I don't know about that.
My swiss hoster just started offering AI and says that their AI infrastructure is 100 % powered by renewables and the waste heat is used for district heating.
You could argue that LLM training in itself used so much energy that you'll never be able to compensate for the damage, but I don't know. 🤷
While good, you should always keep in mind that using renewables for this means that power can't be used for other purposes, meaning the difference has to be covered by other sources of energy. Always bear in mind that these things don't exist in a vaccum. The resources they use always mean resources aren't used elsewhere. At worst this would mean that new clean power is built to power a waste, and then old dirty power has to be used for everything else, instead of being replaced by clean energy.
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So you make noai the default, yes?
I think it's more like NOOOO.
I checked mine and it was off, I didn’t need to do anything.
Meanwhile, at HQ: "The userbase hallucinated that they don't want AI. Maybe we prompted them wrong?"
The prompt was bad: there was no option to vote for "a little bit of AI as a tool is not bad but don't force feed it to me".
I think there were many people who voted for "no AI" who would've voted for "a little bit of ai" if they had the option.
There were probably also people who voted for "yes AI" who would have voted for "a little bit of ai when I explicitly ask for it" if they had the option.
And yet it's opt out, not opt in.
Because the poll just ended... it's been opt out since before the poll and nothing has changed, yet (if anything does change). How is this not obvious?
Yeah. I'm actually kind of upset that I have to type 'noai'. That should be the standard.
I hope they learn their lesson from their own poll.
I mean, the poll was like as not a publicity stunt, to draw attention to the fact DDG is not doing AI. All the same, the fact they are making "no AI" a selling point is noteworthy.
EDIT: I stand corrected -- apparently DDG does do AI presently. Hopefully they're serious about reconsidering that, then.
… the fact DDG is not doing AI.
They are, unless you opt out.
exactly.
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And how much of their budget are they blowing on AI features despite polls showing their regular users don't even want it? Probably also 90%.
90%? Could be selection bias. I think, the result would be a different one if users would have been asked to in the Google AI tab.
You need to fetch users from different places for your sample to get more meaningful results.
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The article already notes that
privacy-focused users who don’t want “AI” in their search are more likely to use DuckDuckGo
But the opposite is also true. Maybe it’s not 90% to 10% elsewhere, but I’d expect the same general imbalance because some people who would answer yes to ai in a survey on a search web site don’t go to search web sites in the first place. They go to ChatGPT or whatever.
It still creeps me out that people use LLMs as search engines nowadays.
That was the plan. That's (I'm guessing) why the search results have slowly yet noticeably degraded since Ai has been consumer level.
They WANT you to use Ai so they can cater the answers. (tin foil hat)
I really do believe that though. Call me a conspiracy theorist but damn it, it fits.
SEO has been fucking up searches long before LLMs were a thing.
It's not that wild of a conspiracy theory. Hard to get definite proof though because you would have to compare actual search results from the past with the results of the same search from today, and we unfortunately can't travel back in time.
But there are indicators for your theory to be true:
- It's evident that in UI design the top area of the screen is the most valuable. AI results are always shown there. So we know that selling AI is of utmost importance to Google.
- The Google search algorithm was altered quite often over the years, these "rollouts" are publicly available information, and a lot of people have written about the changes as soon as they happened.
- Page ranking fueled a whole industry which was called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A lot of effort went into understanding how google ranks its results. This was of course done with a different goal in mind but the conclusions from this field can be used to determine if and how search results got worse over time
- It's an established fact that companies benefit from users never leaving the company's ecosystem. Google as an example tried to prevent a clickthrough to the actual websites in the past, with technologies like AMP or by displaying snippets.
- If users rely on the AI output Google can effectively achieve this: the user is not leaving the page and Google has full control over what content the user sees.
Now, all of the points listed above can be proven. If you put all of that together it seems at least highly likely that your "conspiracy theory" is in fact true.
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the search results have slowly yet noticeably degraded
You mean Google.
All of them. I use DDG as a primary and even those results are worse.
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And Bing, and searches that use google and Bing results (DDG, ecosia)
Search results have been degrading for a lot longer than LLMs have been a thing. Peak usefulness for them was around a decade ago.
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