wack wack
Search is a thing on the internet and always has been, because how would you find anything otherwise other than word-of-mouth?
I've bounced around with search a lot over the years. In the '90s it was Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and others. Then came Google. Good for a while, but then started to suck. A lot. Then came AI, which I'll talk more about in a moment.
In the middle of all this craziness was DuckDuckGo, launched in 2008. They have duck.com now, so yeah, easy to remember. I had always known DDG was there but didn't use it much. However, these days, DDG is now my go-to both for search and, believe it or not, AI.
DDG's AI is duck.ai, but I do appreciate the fact that noai.duckduckgo.com exists. DDG put up a vote at voteyesornoai.com, to where 90% said nope, don't want it in my search, so now a no-AI version of DDG exists. Nice.
However, I do use duck.ai because more often than not it actually works pretty well.
Before I explain why, my main reason for using DDG other than for the better search are the bangs. These come in handy more than a little bit.
If I want to search for an image of something, that's !i image-here like !i guitar. If I want to search Reddit using the old UX (always better) instead of the modernized one, an example of that is !rold guitar. If I want a weather forecast using weather.gov, !wgov tpa. Town/state or ZIP can be alternatively used for that instead of airport codes. If I want to search YouTube, !yt guitar or whatever.
Bangs are ridiculously useful, and DDG has a lot of them.
Where duck.ai is concerned, it's no more correct or incorrect than other AI, but one thing is different in a good way. Duck.ai never gives me an attitude.
This one takes a bit of explanation.
There are days when Grok AI for literally no reason will get snarky and/or use "cool person speak" with its responses, which is ridiculously annoying. I should have taken a screenshot of this, but one time I asked it a programming question, and the reply contained, "You could do [this], but nobody does that anymore so it's not worth your time." That's the equivalent of a trust me bro response.
Then there is other AI that is way too sweet/nice/cute. Gemini is definitely one of those, and Copilot isn't too far behind it.
Duck.ai never gives me an attitude, never does trust-me-bro replies, and doesn't try to be sweet and cute. The responses I get from it are what I call polite and normal, which is all I ever want, even if sometimes the answers I get are wrong (not that there is any AI that provides correct answers 100% of the time).
Some may say that all you need to do is adjust the conversation style and then AI will stop all the attitude crap. I shouldn't have to do that, so I don't.
This is not to say I can't adjust the tone of response with duck.ai, because I totally can do that:
...but the point is I don't have to. The Default setting gets the job done.
And where regular search is concerned, it's good. Not just good enough. Actually good.
If AI ever goes bust, DDG will still be there
The fact DDG launched a no-AI version of their search is very forward thinking. They didn't even need to launch that vote site to figure out if people really wanted AI in their search or not. DDG already knew, because how could they not. The vote just confirmed it.
I do like it that DDG already has a solution right now for no-AI search. Other search engines are neck deep in AI with no way out, so if AI busts, they bust. DDG won't and will still work.
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Published 2026 Jan 27