DuckDuckGo AI Chat

God damn it people. I just want to search the web. You aren't doing anything meaningful by giving me yet another fuzzy robot question machine. Just let me search the web. Queries in, web pages out.

What&#x27;s the business model on this? GPT3.5 and Claude 1.2 aren&#x27;t as expensive as other models, but they&#x27;re not cheap. Is this going to get pulled later, monetised, etc?<p>It&#x27;s concerning in general to see so many companies throwing so much money at this without business models. The big names mostly have either premium tiers or paid API usage, that&#x27;s fine, but DDG&#x2F;Brave&#x2F;BingChat&#x2F;Arc&#x2F;etc are all just giving away money, and when the music stops it&#x27;s possible consumers will be left high and dry.

Being DDG, with its reputation, I’m sure these chats really are never saved - but the wording in the sidebar:<p><i>never saved by us, and not used to train AI models</i><p>could make the more paranoid believe that they could be saved by DDG’s partners - from very directly (Anthropic saves chats with Claude) to indirectly (all channeled through a shady arms-length subsidiary).

&quot;Welcome to DuckDuckGo AI Chat! This chat session is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo. All of your chats here are private, and are never stored by DuckDuckGo or used to train AI models.&quot;<p>Wait, they are sent to OpenAI but they are also &quot;private&quot;? What am I missing here?

Interesting they use the word &#x27;private&#x27; in their strapline, after all they frame themselves as private search albeit they don&#x27;t have their own search engine and market themselves as a privacy search engine. Their index is essentially Bing and they&#x27;re hosted on Microsoft IPs. So not exactly ideal.

Tried a few searches, no sources listed.<p>I don&#x27;t buy into a future where I&#x27;m spoon-fed an answer with no way to verify it. There surely must be a symbiotic relationship between people putting the effort to put content online vs language models monetising it.

I didn&#x27;t know Claude until I saw it as an option for DDG chat model. What caught my attention was the tagline &quot;instant&quot;. Interesting. I decided to give it a try with expectations to see answers coming up almost instantly. And they really did. I&#x27;m enjoying it so far.

I tried this, and it seems like this is just raw AI chat, no search?<p>I do extremely like the Kagi fastgpt feature, which lets you end your search query with a question mark, and above the search results you&#x27;ll get an AI answer, that is based on the content of the top 4-8 results.<p>It&#x27;s very fast and provides citations to the links it used, so it feels quite trustworthy (or at least as trustworthy as the sources it cites), which means I often use the feature and am happy with the response I get.

Test query:<p>Buy bulk pvc in cheyenne, wy<p>FastGPT from kagi recommends national chains, a local plumbing supply store or two, and a specific facebook market page. All of these have hyperlinks.<p>DDG just gives generic advice about national chains.<p>I think the difference is that Kagi built a RAG model out of a web crawl.

Kagi search has something similar, and quite functional.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;fastgpt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;fastgpt</a>

It’s probably table stakes for a search engine at this point. For me though, they all came too late, and I am mostly rewired to go to chatgpt first.<p>(Yes, chatgpt can be wrong, but for things like recipes, song lyrics, etc it’s never wrong enough to matter)

Pretty cool! I use Brave Search (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;search.brave.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;search.brave.com</a>) and it too got AI results a few months ago. They&#x27;re quite helpful!

Who, exactly, wanted to ask a search engine questions that would be answered by bullshit?<p>I quote:<p><pre><code> what is the stoichiometric ratio between 2NO2 and N2O4 </code></pre> The stoichiometric ratio between nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and dinitrogen tetroxide (N2O4) is 1:1. This means that for every one molecule of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) that reacts, one molecule of dinitrogen tetroxide (N2O4) is formed. The equilibrium reaction between nitrogen dioxide and dinitrogen tetroxide can be represented as:<p>2NO2 ⇌ N2O4<p>In this reaction, two molecules of nitrogen dioxide can form one molecule of dinitrogen tetroxide, and vice versa.

I was expecting something where the AI chat could run DDG web searches. If it&#x27;s just a mirror of GPT 3.5&#x2F;Claude, why do I need DDG to be involved?

I have been using DDG as my primary search engine for several years. Their search results is bad now. Not sure if it is deteriorating or it was always bad but I put up with it. DDG could have adopted the Kagi way, let users rank their result, or just genuinely improve the search result. And no, LLM won&#x27;t help us as far as factual information is concerned.

Pretty disapointed that this is just a proxy in front of Claude and ChatGPT, I thought it would be some kind of DDG-hosted llama3 8B since the quality is now good enough with a 8B model.

Private meaning that they don&#x27;t store the chat sessions? We don&#x27;t store them either unless you really want to. Am I missing something?

Pretty easy to block the DOM node with my adblocker.

I stopped using DDG right after they forced &quot;Explore our features&quot; to be enabled all the time.

Thank you for providing the first AI “chat bot” with sane, privacy respecting defaults.

I stopped using DuckDuckGo long ago until they stopped being what they were supposed to be. Obviously, I&#x27;m not alone in this, as they are looking for financial means to stay afloat!

What is a women?<p>GPT-3.5 Turbo<p>A woman is an adult female human being.<p>Claude 1.2 Instant<p>I do not have a definitive definition of what constitutes a woman. Gender identity is a complex topic with personal aspects.

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It would be best for DDG to sell before they are steamrolled from multiple fronts.

imho waste of engineering time…

Why, just be a search engine

how is it free?

Most people use DDG to escape the general search enshittification of Google and Bing, so this feels like a very bad idea. AI chats are basically the ultimate manifestation of the enshittified internet.<p>Also, who needs yet another AI chat powered by the exact same technology of all other AI chats? The race to the bottom is already here and the bottom is clearly visible (at least for now – the bottom will fall off eventually).

Aside from the potential for privacy issues anti-thetical to DDG&#x27;s own stated goals, another problem is these chat AIs can just be inaccurate, if not just outright incorrect, on the simplest topics. Something which would seem to be a risk to DuckDuckGo&#x27;s reputation as a search provider.