Where can I find such accommodating customers myself?
In most companies executives can bypass processes to make projects happen - when done well that allows long term investment to happen when the business case is too complex to reduce to an RoI - when done poorly you end up launching a lot of pet projects that have no market and never will. I feel uniquely positioned to have a good understanding of the maluses and benefits of authoritarian project creation from all three angles and the best solution I've seen is to let it happen but bring down the hammer if things get too absurd.
thats a lot of c-suites
(or the anti-ai crowd is more vocal than the occasional chatgpt user)
All these anti-Google, anti-facebook, anti-Instagram, anti-OpenAI, anti-Claude stories are exactly that. Provide copium and feel good for a handful of people for a few days.
Salesman have for a long time teaching new salesman to use NLP tricks like matching and mirroring to convince people you're relatable and trustworthy. Google is doing this with all the data they have on you.
Unfortunately I have seen far too many people, especially less tech savvy ones rely pretty heavily on the AI summaries provided by the search engines. And I think it can be a bit dangerous to have these results be super unreliable in what they state. The Google one also isn't perfect, but I've at least found it's a bit more accurate. However I personally don't really care for either. As I mentioned in my OP if I already made the choice to use a search engine, it's likely because I don't care for an AI response as I could open up Claude/ChatGPT or whatever's interface and ask the question there if I just wanted AI.
Think of premium branding analogy: masses get cheap AI slop, wealthy get high quality human-curated and human-created produce. Like organic vs regular food.
So for example all the productivity/digital detox channels and videos are themselves a consumer demand to be watched on YouTube, on phones. And now we have anti-AI products marking themselves higher for a feature that didn't previously exist. It's like the tree of capital gets split at every turn.
I did have one site which told me I needed to use Chrome, Edge, or Firefox to use their site. Which kind of made me laugh considering the engine Brave uses. It was a really interactive JS heavy training site, so I guess they really wanted to be sure the browser was compatible to avoid support issues.
If you're just trying new browsers to see what's out there and clean, I've really liked Orion.
That being said, I've used "Ask Leo" a handful of time, with mixed results. It's really good for "Give me the TLDR" or "Find the part of the page that talks about X".
But this is also just my anecdotal experience and I haven't been on DDG for long yet since Kagi, so my perspective may not be proper yet.
My suspicion - for which I have no proof - is this: With search results, Google marks the ads. The marking has gotten ever more subtle over the years, but it's there. If you want to avoid clicking on ads, you can. With AI, Google wants to integrate ads seamlessly into the results. If you search for widgets, and Acme Corp. has paid Google enough, the AI summary will praise the virtues of Acme's widgets. And the user will have no idea that this is paid placement, instead of a summary of product reviews, etc..
Like many companies, they seem strangely determined to force AI on customers, even if it costs them money.
“If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.” - Steve Jobs
The funniest one for me in google is +"foo" they decided people didn't actually mean it, so they changed it to +""foo"" - then when we all started doing that, they made the new secret "yes I really want that string" to be +"""foo"""
DDG today has two search options, IMO, both could get some improvement.
DDG probably won't want the first and the last there, but the second is valuable.
The normal page has a link to the ai, and used to have an ai except (IDK if it disappeared because I went to the no-ai page), but before that it used to have an except taken from the most relevant page by a set of rules.
The link to ai is useful, and the old except was very useful.
Of course there are no absolute numbers or scale. This is just an advertisement for DuckDuckGo. It's gross that previously respected tech publications run this kind of slop for clicks
An educated guess is they're doing a similar number of searches today.
The traffic graph used to be at:
https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
By late 2022 (18 November) it was a tabular presentation without the graph, and disappeared shortly afterward: <https://web.archive.org/web/20221118045948/https://duckduckg...>.
It's gone by 6 Dec 2022 (redirect to homepage): <https://web.archive.org/web/20221206080717/https://duckduckg...>
Is that because every page you land on these days is just AI slop?
I've never noticed the challenge, but then, I don't think I've ever clicked 20 pages into the search results either. Usually if I've clicked on a couple of pages I feel it's time to refine my query..
But I guess sometimes it doesn't work??
> Please note: we are aware some of our advanced syntax isn't operating 100% correctly on all queries and are actively working on it. It is unfortunately a non-trivial issue given we get our private results from a variety of sources.
After switching between Perplexity, Phind, and a couple others, it seems like the best balance for my use.
You can always just use the regular Brave search. It does seem to include an AI summary by default, but you can turn that off: https://search.brave.com/settings#:~:text=Make%20AI%2Dpowere...
I find it is grounded in facts (based on the results) more and doesn’t typically make stuff up. I am usually using it for things I am more well versed in (web dev) so I have a baseline knowledge to draw from.
Better privacy, good results, no drama, first search engine to include bangs, and its free!
DuckDuckGo results are even more frustrating than the currently-terrible version of Google for finding good information IMO.
The AI popup is the worst and will hallucinate answers from Reddit comments. I specifically had it ask me a nonsense question which was literally just someone's Reddit comment suggesting a follow-on topic B to the search topic A. The AI mode will _sometimes_ be useful enough to prompt into doing the search and summarization for me and get me just enough info and some links to continue the work myself.
For some context sensitive searches where words overlap with more common topics I have a Kagi subscription.
> DuckDuckGo search results, seem to be based on either crude geolocation or recent movies of similar names, bizarrely, when I search for specific technical terms. I have to qualify searches with multiple negations to get anything of interest to someone with more than high school education and interests.
Unfortunately, whenever I used DuckDuckGo, the search results were also crap - and the User Interface was crap too. For some reason these web-searches suck, from A to Z, starting at the UI, but more importantly showing search "results" that are really qualitatively not good or inclusive. We already HAD good results - Google search used to be usable, then Google killed it off deliberately. Some inspiration Google appears to have taken from youtube, where you can search for "xyz", and it shows you "abc" instead after a while, which is horrible but not totally horrible as you may just watch another video. But for exact text search, copying that was stupid. Google ruined its search engine deliberately over several years, hoping that people will never notice it. And now we should use this crap AI garbage "search"? That is a privatized web. I refuse to help transition to private actors controlling the www. For similar reasons I do not use AMP and recommend everyone to not fall for the trap Google puts at you.
Either way, someone can hopefully tell the DuckDuckGo team to offer alternatives that do not suck in their search engine. (Qwant also sucks, by the way - they just copy/pasted Google's search UI; perhaps some people want it, I don't. I want oldschool search. Simple. Stay simple. Don't clutter the UI. Don't add garbage. Don't lie to the user. And so forth.)
DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode