DuckDuckGo’s search engine introduced AI assist and an AI chat as opt-out features, which it repeatedly re-enables at random, with no ability to disable it permanently, even though we’ve been able for years to set a bookmarklet to make all our other DDG settings persist.
Users are very unhappy, with requests for a way to permanently disable AI features ignored, receiving only patronising responses from DDG.
No matter, DDG’s utility for searching has deteriorated these past years so severely, even relative to the deterioration we’ve seen with many other options, that I wonder will it survive.
It is always unfortunate when a recommended privacy tool shifts away from privacy, but several doing so all at once is alarming.
Have tried out SearxNG without self-hosting, via different instances, but had to abandon it as it is way, way beyond my mental capabilities to get it to work.
I doubt I could manage to self-host, having looked into Docker for some other matter.
Using Mojeek currently, which isn’t great but not too terrible.
Well, it worked initially, then more often than not my searches produced no results or confusing error messages.
Experimented a lot with the SearxNG settings, and also with my browser and firewall settings in case there was some issue there, and eventually gave up.
I was unable to find information online about the issues I experienced, in part because I had no idea how to describe them in order to find help.
Think I tried it in three different browsers, over the course of a month or so, but primarily in Firefox.
To be honest, I never tried publicly available instances of any privacy front-ends (SearxNG, Nitter, Redlib etc.). I always self-host and route all such traffic via VPN.
My initial issue with SearxNG was with the default selection of search engines. Default inclusion of Qwant engine caused irrelevant and non-english results to return. Currently my selection is limited to Google, Bing and Brave as DDG takes around 2 sec to return result (based on the VPN server location I’m using).
If you still remember the error messages, I might help to help fix that.
Yup.
DuckDuckGo’s search engine introduced AI assist and an AI chat as opt-out features, which it repeatedly re-enables at random, with no ability to disable it permanently, even though we’ve been able for years to set a bookmarklet to make all our other DDG settings persist.
Users are very unhappy, with requests for a way to permanently disable AI features ignored, receiving only patronising responses from DDG.
No matter, DDG’s utility for searching has deteriorated these past years so severely, even relative to the deterioration we’ve seen with many other options, that I wonder will it survive.
It is always unfortunate when a recommended privacy tool shifts away from privacy, but several doing so all at once is alarming.
You may self-host SearxNG (via Docker) and avoid direct interaction with search engines - be it google, bing, Brave or DDG.
SearxNG will act as a privacy front-end for you.
https://github.com/searxng/searxng
Have tried out SearxNG without self-hosting, via different instances, but had to abandon it as it is way, way beyond my mental capabilities to get it to work.
I doubt I could manage to self-host, having looked into Docker for some other matter.
Using Mojeek currently, which isn’t great but not too terrible.
Though it is an off-topic but what exact issues you faced with SearxNG?
Well, it worked initially, then more often than not my searches produced no results or confusing error messages.
Experimented a lot with the SearxNG settings, and also with my browser and firewall settings in case there was some issue there, and eventually gave up.
I was unable to find information online about the issues I experienced, in part because I had no idea how to describe them in order to find help.
Think I tried it in three different browsers, over the course of a month or so, but primarily in Firefox.
To be honest, I never tried publicly available instances of any privacy front-ends (SearxNG, Nitter, Redlib etc.). I always self-host and route all such traffic via VPN.
My initial issue with SearxNG was with the default selection of search engines. Default inclusion of Qwant engine caused irrelevant and non-english results to return. Currently my selection is limited to Google, Bing and Brave as DDG takes around 2 sec to return result (based on the VPN server location I’m using).
If you still remember the error messages, I might help to help fix that.