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Karen E. Lund 💙💛

@aral I've been using the DuckDuckGo browser and its accompanying search engine on my tablet for a while and quite liking it.

This morning I did a search and the first result was an AI synopsis of the subject.

UGH!

Then I noticed the little cog icon for settings. Clicked it. Presented with a list of options regarding how often I want to see AI results.

Clicked "Never."

We'll see. I'm hopeful.

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Aral Balkan

@Karen5Lund Don’t forget they’re VC-funded. They will go to shit eventually. They all do. (See the news section which is all Microsoft links, for example.) I’ve started using/paying for Kagi and it’s currently good.

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Karen E. Lund 💙💛

@aral Have not heard of Kagi; I'll look into it.

Sooner or later doesn't everything go bad?

Aral Balkan

@Karen5Lund Not necessarily. Or, at least, some things are designed to avoid it as opposed to designed for it being it the success mode.

Apr 16, 2025, 05:51 AM·Public·Mona for iPhone
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Mad
@aral @Karen5Lund A subscription model as opposed to an advertising model is still based on a profit motive, so even if it's better it has to inevitably go to shit unless a different incentive takes over. I think the ultimate solution is distributed search, which would be run on a social incentive by communities, but a more private alternative like DDG is great for until we get there. If Kagi is the temporary alternative that works for you, great, but I'm perfectly happy using and, more importantly, recommending DDG.

(I was also very pissed at the AI feature when it first popped up, but I immediately disabled it and have been pretending it never existed to begin with)
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Aral Balkan

@mad @Karen5Lund DDG has $182.4M in venture capital funding. Those investors are looking for it to become a multi-billion dollar corporation. How does it do that? (Kagi also has VC and will also enshittify.)

Agree on free/open distributed search as the alternative but that’s such a hard problem. Maybe the pragmatic alternative is social search and friend networks and collections of small sites, etc. Can see the Small Web contributing this.

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