Tack “&udm=14” on to the end of a normal search, and you’ll be booted into the clean 10 blue links interface. While Google might not let you set this as a default, if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults.
DDG only uses the web indexing from bing. There’s no AI on DDG, and the search result is created by themselves, without MS tracking or fingerprinting.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/08/duckassist/
So far this actually seems like a good, privacy respecting implementation of a chatbot. Good for those who don’t want to go the full offline selfhosted route IMO
I actually don’t think its a “bad” idea to have an AI helper like a copilot or a Gemini on my computer. But I don’t want it integrated into every system. I don’t want it to have any more access than I choose to give it each time I use it.
I can see myself making use of a sandboxed AI, installed kind of like a flatpak or an appimage. I can call it up, ask it to do something for me and if it needs access to something temporarily in order to do it, it can ask nicely and I say sure on an as hoc basis and then shut it down again.