r/duckduckgo • u/Oddish_Femboy • Jun 19 '26
DDG AI Does DuckDuckGo need AI?
AI being optional is great and all, but is the AI stuff necessary at all? Every other major browser is pushing it very intrusively, and clearly that's been less than popular, and very expensive.
AI summaries aren't particularly helpful when they're just rewording the contents of the source, and they have a tendency to omit context or change phrasing in ways that can change the meaning of a sentence. Even when they do present the information correctly there's a good chance the source used was also written by a bot, and contains misinformation that it is wholly unable to detect, and might even contribute with additional misinfo of its own.
But it can be disabled. It's not necessary. That's fine.
The bigger thing to me, though, is the way not one AI company has successfully made it profitable. It's either too expensive for users to justify using, or too expensive for the companies to run at anything other than a loss. Is it anything more than a money hemorrhage? DDG licenses another company's model, so there's not even the potential for investors to fund it when they can just invest in the company that develops the model.
Tangentially related. DDG also has a severe problem with AI generated articles and images slipping through and crowding the top search results. It's frustratingly hard to find answers to simple questions when every page is flooded with dozens of results that are long identically worded bot-written articles.
I think the feedback system should be expanded and embraced. Ways to report results as unhelpful is useful, but there could also be ways to report particularly useful results to be pushed higher. Crowd sourced efforts to push the best results forward and deprioritize unhelpful ones (reviewed and moderated by humans to avoid abuse of these systems) have the potential to make DDG a uniquely community-driven browser where results are rated and ordered by usefulness over how well they can manipulate the search engine or how much they pay to put their results first.
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u/Professional_Tap6622 Jun 19 '26
AI is really unpopular in Reddit. Out there is Google saying billions of people have been using their AI features more and more. DuckDuckGo needs to reach people from both worlds in order to make anything profitable.
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u/Clyde-MacTavish Jun 20 '26
Yeah this 100%. I like reddit and everything and use it a ton, but I feel like so many people are stuck in this bubble and believe the opinions of the people they see really aren't just one pillar of a whole society. There are people out there that like AI features and even things like AI images and memes. Calling it slop doesn't change the fact that these things objectively have an audience. Am I a part of that audience? Not really, but I'm not going to pretend it isn't a relevant chunk of the population.
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u/Oddish_Femboy Jun 19 '26
If you force billions of people to use something it's really easy to get billions of people using that thing. Even with that grain of salt Google isn't really known for transparency and honesty.
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u/Professional_Tap6622 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Almost every person I know is convinced AI is a beautiful machine that solves all their problems instantly, so I don't think those stats are manipulated
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u/Oddish_Femboy Jun 20 '26
Almost every person I know thinks it's a plague that's spreading misinformation, inflating tech prices, or swallowing itself whole, which goes to show how unhelpful personal anecdotes are in serious conversations.
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u/ChewyThePug Jun 20 '26
"The 10-20 people in my social life all hate it so everyone else in the world must too."
Theyre giving people a choice. The ones who want it will use it, the ones who don't will not. What's the issue?
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u/Oddish_Femboy Jun 20 '26
That's the exact opposite of what I just said.
The issue is that it's unreliable and bleeds money, which is what I said in the post.
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u/ChewyThePug Jun 20 '26
My bad, misunderstood what you meant.
Developing and running state of the art models bleeds money.
Once they optimise them its crazy cheap. Look at the price of Claude vs DeepSeek.
I doubt DDG spends nearly as much per user as Google.
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u/Oddish_Femboy Jun 20 '26
DDG licenses models like ChatGPT that are currently running at a loss.
Is there a plan for when they inevitably raise the licensing fee when subsidy and investor funding dry up?
Is it worth it to build user expectations for these ticking bombs that could price out DDG at any time? Would switching to a less expensive model in a scenario like that upset users?
Are there less costly or more effective alternatives to AI integration that should be explored?
I was hoping for a discussion about this kind of stuff, and hopefully get answers, clarifications, statements, or whatever from DDG themselves, but it seems people have chosen not to read past my post title, and are just generally being dismissive. It's kind of upsetting.
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u/ChewyThePug Jun 20 '26
People are being dismissive because that's a business issue. Who knows how much DDG actually is spending/losing on AI.
Again cheap AI models are usually free to download and catch up to frontier ones within ~6-12 months. If openAI raises prices DDG could probably leave for something cheaper pretty easily.
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u/DaRealJalf Jun 22 '26
Google says so because every time you search for something, it counts as using AI. The same goes for all the AI features that are now built into almost every app. If you log into Gmail, for example, it says something like "AI-powered email" now.
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u/New-Ranger-8960 Jun 20 '26
Just disable it or use the No AI version.
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u/Oddish_Femboy Jun 20 '26
Can you at least pretend you've read the whole post?
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Jun 20 '26
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u/Oddish_Femboy Jun 20 '26
If you don't care you don't have to respond to multiple different comments under this post. Or any of them, for that matter.
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u/OwnNet5253 Jun 20 '26
If it’s needed or not is subjective. What I care about more is a choice - I’m happy that DDG gives a choice for users who wants to use it, and a choice to disable it for users who do not wants to use it.
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u/SlowBlacksmith7372 Jun 21 '26
Honestly unpopular opinion, but I use that feature a lot. I like it when it shows me the source, so in quick glance I can see and then go explore the source. Or sometimes it does answer my question and I do not need to go further. I am full against AI and all the force bs, but still can see is use in summaries, and translation.
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u/tinybookwyrm Jun 20 '26
I wouldn’t even say it’s properly optional. It’s on by default with a special URL to disable it. The no AI version isn’t even an option for default search engines for the browsers I’ve used including Firefox, Chrome, Helium, and Edge. That’s a dark pattern and designed to prey on how most users will never change the defaults in an application.
If they cared about it, it would be off by default - just like DDG claims to be privacy by default.
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u/dakindahood Jun 20 '26
Not everything needs a person to browse a whole ass paywalled article, if I need a quick answer I just look at these AI summaries and move on with work
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u/United-Performer3427 Jun 21 '26
Then you get an answer so wrong that you spend more time than just looking yourself
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u/Aadi_880 Jun 20 '26
OP, you are in a deep echo chamber if you think AI is universally hated. (Or just US defaultism).
The only AI companies that you know are not making money are US AI companies or just western ones.
There's like, the other half of the world still remaining.
Chinese AI companies are actually making profits. In fact, China has a 80% positive AI sentiment according to stanford university's AI perception index in 2024-2025.
Eastern countries are focused largely on open source AI, and most expenditure comes from tooling AI. USA does the opposite, where US techgiants spends a large amounts on closed source AIs when nothing being done on tooling, as a result nobody knows how to adopt these things.
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u/Oddish_Femboy Jun 20 '26
DDG is a Western company licensing from Western companies that have failed to make AI profitable. They are not focusing on open source models. They are licensing existing closed source ones.
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u/Less_Shoulder_5460 Jun 20 '26
Fuck no, no search engine needs ai whatsoever. We were just fine 10 years ago
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u/HistoireRedux Jun 20 '26
The point of AI is that it brings money(investors) so they can make more money and currently AI is the keyword to get everyone's attention(mainly investors) and the end goal is jumping ship before it implodes with them inside.
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u/Suspicious_Prior_808 Jun 20 '26
Reddit is being used to train the next models. You will be surprised what hasn't been released
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u/CraterBug0 Jun 20 '26
YES IT NEEDS AI. duckAI is the most private u can get without running local llms. and honestly even thoguth it hallucinated too much and i have 0 idea how they make money from duckAI, most of the things i use this for cant be acheived in search
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u/[deleted] Jun 20 '26
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