Imperfect

duckduckgo without ai

Wanting a fallback search engine, I recently found DuckDuckGo's subdomain for searching without its AI widget: noai.duckduckgo.com.

Given my frequency of discussing AI in a positive light, why on Earth would I want to reduce its presence, let alone share how to do that? My reasoning lies in how helpful it could be for myself and readers like you, including but not limited to: privacy enthusiasts, AI skeptics, or those that operate search engines, AI tools differently.

With search engines, I type keywords and optional operators into a single-line text input. My expectation upon submitting my query is being shown a paginated list of results with hopefully contextual web page hyperlinks, page titles, and content snippets. I desire information from one or more of the linked pages instead of from the search results page itself. Save a personalized experience for getting me where I want to go as efficiently as possible.

With AI tools, I type natural language instructions optionally formatted via markup languages into a longer, if not multi-line text input. Those lighter constraints afford more personalized, in-depth asks that would falter or fail with regular search engines. Rakhim's AI is impressive because we’ve failed at semantic web and personal computing illustrates what I mean:

Unless someone wrote an article about that exact thing, a plain full-text search engine cannot answer a question like this:

What animal is featured on a flag of a country where the first small British colony was established in the same year that Sweden's King Gustav IV Adolf declared war on France?

But ChatGPT got the correct answer in a few seconds.

Flag of Dominica features the Sisserou parrot, which is only found in Dominica. Great Britain established a small colony on the island in 1805.

Google's AI widget failed miserably, by the way.

My expectation upon submitting my prompt is being shown an assistant response with hopefully contextual copy, citations, and web page hyperlinks. Like with search engines, I may be scrutinizing linked pages for content. However, I may also be looking for my desired information embedded within however many responses I can prompt for. AI tools layer an evolving conversation atop searches propelling me closer to what I want.

Much of my thinking derives not only from personal experience, but also from Jack presenting how LLMs and AI tools are most useful for search and follow ups. He adds even more nuance to the discussion by explaining the edge that dedicated AI search tools can have over their counterparts:

Side note: right now, I prefer using Perplexity because it's specifically designed as a search tool, i.e. sift through and use real sources of human-generated information and data and surface that for me, as opposed to a model that's been trained on a large dataset and is putting together answers based on its training. Although it seems like only a matter of time before they are all good at this.

What other AI use cases could his closing sentiment apply to?

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