You can permanently disable the chatbot in full DDG search. Click the little gear.
Not if you use a private browser. They save that setting using cookies, which usually are deleted when you close the browser.
Which highlights how dumb that setup is (by which I mean using cookies for settings). The privacy-friendly search engine compromises your privacy with AI when you use a private browser
You can change the settings to your heart’s content, then scroll to the bottom and click “Show Bookmarklet and Settings Data”. It’ll give you a URL you can save to your bookmarks and use.
Depending on your browser you can set the custom URL as a search engine and always keep your settings, no cookies needed
To be fair, I do wish more privacy-friendly browsers took DDG mobile’s approach, namely torch all sites but make it really easy to (and prompt you to) whitelist frequently used ones.
neither does DuckDuckGo Lite and it’s what I’ve been using since regular DDG kept thinking I wanted a chatbot to eavesdrop on my searches…
I should just host my own SearXNG at this point.
SearXNG is really easy to setup, you should have a go at it.
You can permanently disable the chatbot in full DDG search. Click the little gear.
It does make me wonder what API they use. I thought it was huggingface (which would be less bad), but they don’t say it explicitly.
Pretty sure it’s ChatGPT. That’s what it used to take you to when you would choose to continue the conversation from the initial AI prompt.
Looks like they offer a few if you pay though: https://duckduckgo.com/pro
Not if you use a private browser. They save that setting using cookies, which usually are deleted when you close the browser.
Which highlights how dumb that setup is (by which I mean using cookies for settings). The privacy-friendly search engine compromises your privacy with AI when you use a private browser
You can change the settings to your heart’s content, then scroll to the bottom and click “Show Bookmarklet and Settings Data”. It’ll give you a URL you can save to your bookmarks and use.
Depending on your browser you can set the custom URL as a search engine and always keep your settings, no cookies needed
Yeah, that’s problematic, heh.
To be fair, I do wish more privacy-friendly browsers took DDG mobile’s approach, namely torch all sites but make it really easy to (and prompt you to) whitelist frequently used ones.
There’s a Lite?? Oh my gosh, you’re a hero. I use private browsing a lot (lol) and the site would never remember me disabling the chatbot.
You can also use http://noai.duckduckgo.com/. It’s the regular search, but with AI disabled, and doesn’t require cookies.
Now this is what I really wanted!
I had cookies enabled for DDG but their stupid chatbot still re-enabled itself more than once which was enough for me to switch.
However now I’m used to how fast DDG Lite loads…
Yes, the speed of DDG Lite is amazing. There’s also DDG HTML, which is very fast too. I would like Ecosia to have a lite mode as well.
Been using a self-hosted SearXNG instance for 6 months now and its results have been so much better than Google or DDG. Definitely give it a shot
TIL about DDG Lite. Thank you