What are your opinions on Yahoo search now?
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
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 neededYeah, 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
Yahoo Mail has AI summaries of received emails. Don’t ask me how I know.
How do you know?
I think of Yahoo as ‘The search engine that malware sets as default to get paid for referrals or something’.
Yahoo has been dead since 2015 everywhere but Japan
i miss yahoo answers
I don’t think I’ve used it once in ~25 years.
it’s owned 10% by verizon
Is the only reason they don’t have AI because they just don’t have the resources to set up and run their own models and bots?
Not really? Most websites putting AI on things are just calling out to Copilot, ChatGPT or whatever.
I’m guessing they don’t feel like having this expense right now.
it’s still just bing search like everything else. but anyway there’s plenty of search engines without ai
