Submitted 1 month ago by glitching@lemmy.ml to youshouldknow@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/20e956f5-45d6-4ef8-a903-23292846fbfe.png
DDG has a noAI portal that filters out AI images and doesn’t bother you with summations and things. it’s available at noai.duckduckgo.com and you can add it as a separate search engine to Firefox thusly.
This can also be achieved just by changing the DuckDuckGo’s settings using the menu in the top-right corner of the page. You can also turn off other things including adverts if you want to.
That works as long as you have the cookies for it; it won’t work in private browsing. Using OP’s method works in private browsing, too.
Both are good.
There’s a button “Show Bookmarklet and Settings Data” that saves all the settings to query parameters
I remember when cruise control first became widespread for cars. Most people didn’t use it or barely used it. Some people, like me, did a lot of testing and figured out the best ways to use it, and ended up using it more than most. But then, there were people who just assumed it would work perfectly like they imagined, and used it as if it was a full-self-driving car, which immediately had bad results.
I think the worst thing about AI is that it lures people into fully trusting it, and they don’t even realize that their cruise control car is heading off-road towards a cliff. AI can be a useful tool if you know what you’re doing, but it is such a bad idea to have it on by default. Even a lot of fairly experienced users are tricked by AI. The average person doesn’t have a chance. It’s irresponsible to expose them to it.
I was going to mention about this whole thing with Winnebago and a driver assuming cruise control was FSD, but turns out that story is completely false. My father told me that story 10 years ago and I never thought to fact check it…
Somebody at work showed me keyword shortcuts ages ago and I have tons of them now.
What are those?
Well I’m so glad you asked!!
You’re looking at one in the screenshot. Firefox does this, as dos Chrome and some other browsers as well.
A bookmark keyword is a tiny bit of text that you can configure your browser to treat differently when you use it in the location bar.
Typically, whatever you type into the browser location bar will either treat that text like a website you’re trying to go to (like “apnews.com” or “www.wikipedia.org”) or text that gets sent to a search engine (like “tasty dinner ideas” or “best white socks”). However, if the text you enter starts with a bookmark keyword you’ve set up, the browser will insert the rest of the text you entered into a website address in a specified place.
This is typically useful to speed up searching on specific websites.
So if you want to search Wikipedia for “particle physics”, you can go to the Wikipedia website and enter “particle physics” into the search box and click the search button. That would send you to a page with search results of the text you entered. If you look at the location bar, you should see a URL that looks like this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=parti…
What we notice here is that the text you entered, “particle physics” is right there in the URL.
To turn this into a bookmark keyword, you create a bookmark to this search results page, then replace your search term with the characters “%s”, so the bookmark URL would look like so:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%25s
Then, in the “keyword” box, you can enter whatever text you want to use for this shortcut. For Wikipedia, I like using just the letter ‘w’. (You don’t need quotes around it.) Save the bookmark, and that’s it.
Now, whenever you want to search Wikipedia, all you have to do is type “w particle physics” or “w forest fires” or “w whatever” into the location bar and the browser will take you directly to the search page with those results.
You can do this with basically any website with search functionality: search engines, retail stores, news, IMDb, reference resources, whatever.
This feature also can be used for going to detail pages directly if you have a specific reference number.
So let’s say you’re at work and you have a trouble ticketing system that shows details of ongoing issues. The URL for ticket number q-rt-654321 might look like this:
troubletickets.mycompanyfoo.biz/ticket/…/view
So if you had the ticket number handy (like from an email chain), you could create a bookmark keyword to go directly to the ticket detail page:
troubletickets.mycompanyfoo.biz/ticket/%s/view
…and use the keyword “tt” for trouble ticket.
Now you can just type “tt q-rt-654321” into the location bar and go right to the detail page (presuming the ticket number is accurate).
And that’s it.
Opera had this 20+ years ago. Once you get used to it, there’s no going back.
Great. Now i can get rid of the pre-2023 hack. It discarded lots of recently-updated sites anyway.
The fact that something should be a specific way has absolutely nothing to to with the way it actually is.
F.W. Nietzsche, Morgenröthe
If you see AI you need to duck, duck again then go (as fast as you can)
…or to Vivaldi, or vanilla Chrome, or any other browser that has search engine options in its Settings.
Even edge has that nowadays.
There is also the no-java site, idk if it filters out ai images, but doesn’t seem to have ai otherwise, no search assist.
Java is not Javascript. They’re not even related. Netscape chose the name to profit from Java’s poularity back in its’ day.
Thanks for the correction. The message does say “redirecting to non-javascript site” when I search with noscript installed.
there’s also https://lite.duckduckgo.com
For lazy people like me: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s
It's getting encoded. % is a special character in URIs. Let me try posting it inside of back ticks, as well as triple back ticks:
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s
I've noticed that there's a plague of threadiverse clients which improperly escape/encode URIs. It's most evident with how they mangle parenthesis in Wikipedia article titles.
%20 is the URL-encoded form of a space; %25 is the URL-encoded form of the percent sign. The URL you are posting gets re-encoded and % becomes %25 (in the same way that a space becomes %20)
It’s encoding your URL into the correct format for your Browers URL bar. “%25” is the encoded version of “%”, so it’s being replaced.
It’s obviously incorrect in this instance since it’s not an actual URL. Maybe it wouldn’t happen if you’re able to put the URL string into a code block?
Why tf is http not unicode yet?
And you can use the three dots menu on each link in the search results to file that a result is AI slop or otherwise not trustworthy and also filter domains from your future search results.
I don’t mind when it links to wiki but I actually follow the link to verify. It totally made up a pardon from the king of England to some guy yesterday
Yeah I have duck ai on. I’m a hypocrite. If it’s some bullshit question I tend to go with it, but if it’s anything remotely important I ignore it.
Isn’t it better to put “q=%s” in Advanced, POST; instead of GETting it by having “?q=%s” in the URL?
there’s also a yesai.duckduckgo.com version, lol
Can I combine this with start.duckduckgo.com ?
And is there a mist of all the *.duckduckgo links?
Yes you can, by using the settings: start.duckduckgo.com/settings#aifeatures
I just search with ecosia Now
They plant trees for their profits
Ecosia wants to become an “AI powered” search engine as well now. Recent reviews on Kununu imply that the CEO/COO are pushing this against employee resistance.
I wonder if there is any difference between noai.duckduckgo.com/lite and lite.duckduckgo.com/lite 🤔
To remove room for doubt of that just pushed to change default search engine of Konform Browser to noai domain.
Ty for reminding me of this!
Don’t know why you would, its as good as any other ai search summary and completely private.
Because people want to be free from being bombarded by AI slop.
Fan of DDG, but i find SearX with better results
I just repeated a very specific search I made earlier today on DDG using SearX for the first time. The results are very similar, with many identical links. SearX gave me more forum results versus listicles though. From a one shot it looks pretty good. I’ll save it, thanks.
Thanks !
Also just made that my chrome homepage. Tried Firefox a couple times before but its even more bloated
I used DDG last night to search something with the hide ai images option checked and third result was from aiwallpapers.com
Yeah I know it’s a new feature and there’s gonna be some kinks but come on IT’S IN THE URL
thanky
logicbomb@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’m going to say something spicy here, but for me personally, I’ve found DuckDuckGo’s AI search summaries to be quite useful. Not for the actual AI summary text, but for the links they give, which are often better than the normal search results.
That being said, I could easily do without them.
RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
As I said elsewhere, the problem is in fact that search engine providers deliberately make their search results worse to push AI usage. This keeps the user entirely under their control and at the same time hurts the websites the AI training data was stolen from, because no one will bother to visit them any more. I’m not saying DDG does this, but they get their search results from other search engines where this is the case.
lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Is that a documented fact that they make old search worse to promote AI?
can@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
While we’re at it, I also like that they give me an AI chat that is ostensibly more private than alternatives for the times it’s useful. And choosing different models is great.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I agree. I don’t trust the AI at all, but the links are quick and easy to use.
priapus@piefed.social 1 month ago
You can also set them to only show up when you click a button for them, which I always preferred.
logicbomb@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This is perfect for my use case. I mostly think AI results are a waste of energy, but having them on demand can be useful.
thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Unfortunately not possible when using temporary containers
Temporary Containers Plus is a Firefox extension that puts all containerless tabs in temporary throwaway containers that get deleted soon after they become unused
It does, however, interfere with saving site settings because cookies won’t be saved.
silverhand@reddthat.com 1 month ago
Same for me with Perplexity.
whaleross@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Me too, but fair warning to double check on the links if it is something niche. Perplexity can not always be trusted to interpret limited information properly. It does a pretty good job on enough for me to use it though.
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 1 month ago
A spicier take still: I personally have found DDG’s AI summaries useful even without further clicking. When one’s query is purely technical (vs politics or whatever), I don’t see any need to click dutifully.