This is an intermediary step to what will ultimately upend search: LLMs parsing web search results and giving you succinct results without you having to read them yourself.

If you haven't tried Arc Search's "Browse for Me" feature, you should. It isn't perfect yet, but I think it's clear that's the direction of search in the future.

The issue is LLM’s also generating the web results. Garbage in, garbage out. The real problem is maintaining the ability to find the ground of real knowledge.

Garbage content on the web existed long before LLMs were the new hot thing on the street. There are ways to weight or even exclude results that are poor quality, and that'll still be necessary.

I just don't want to search the web. I have questions and I want answers- searching the web is an intermediate step, not the end solution.

I have Question X and the answer isn't to surface "Blog Post Y"... it's the content of Blog Post Y I need, and only the subset of the content that answers my question, perhaps synthesized with the content of 5 other blog posts, a couple scientific papers and a recent press release.

We're now in this temporary zone where "just searching the web" is still the optimal way to get answers, while search engine companies are piling into other stuff.

But very shortly that other stuff will become our go-to.

You're not wrong in terms of the average user's intent (they mostly don't care about the source, they care about the content), but I see this as an ethical gray area when search engines effectively offer up all this content created by bloggers without the need of the user to visit the site itself.

Phind tries to ameliorate this a bit by providing a set of links where the summarized data comes from, but most people likely won't even click on these links.

It's going to be rather demotivating when your site's traffic suddenly gets cut in half.

If you talk to a collegue and say "what should I use to do X", and they say "use FooX", because they read it in a book last year, is that unethical?

Most of the top results in search engines are terrible, mainly because of the SEO spam

We'll eventually reach that with AI of course, but for now we haven't.

Sometimes, often, I really just want to search the web. I just want to see what's out there! I have some vague ideas that I am trying to make more coherent and give sharper edges too, and I'm exploring the space those ideas fit into to see what others have done with them. Often I don't have a specific question in mind, and trying to frame my query as a coherent question will be limiting.

As another poster commented, don't take away my agency by trying to predict my intent! Better yet, don't try to force intent on me.

Arguably Google has been taking your agency away and predicting your intent for the last decade at a minimum. The only difference here seems to be that you’re noticing it.

This is why I don't use Google since a long time ago.

At this point, anybody here likely has had the privilege of being educated to prefer primary sources of information over secondary, tertiary, etc.

The indexing feature that search engines for years provided was a side-effect and benefit of the internet’s success.

There have always been challenges with this as it is not immediately clear what should be treated as “primary source” information — it takes time and skill — the user in this model is accountable for their own exploration and consumption of other peoples’ knowledge.

AI seems to be purposefully at odds with that. So, for me, the distrust and avoidance is well-placed.

That said, it’s a powerful tool that has a place in the world, but I hope it doesn’t come at a detriment to the colloquial understanding of what it means to “search the web”

Search is pretty horrible these days imo.

My main fear with AI becoming our go-to information retrieval platform is how can we be sure that the answer is objective truth without any slant? Shouldn't there be an ethical obligation that a model should not only fact check but also provide alternative theories? We lost that somewhere in journalism but we could regain that if we prioritized that the thinking and deciding still needs to occur human-side.

Go try to ask any of these hosted LLM bots about sexual topics to find out how far from objectivity we are. I earned a stern warning after trying to write a dirty pun with ChatGPT

Imagine trying to do research on sexually transmitted diseases, or trying to self-educate about sex. Unfortunately the limits put in place are quite coarse today.

This (DuckDuckGo AI Chat) is currently separate from search results, and in any case we plan to offer settings to turn off any AI search integrations, similarly for how we do for instant answers and ads.

I really like the way this has been added to the UI. It's off to the side so I can just use DDG as God intended if I want to, but also is distinct enough that I discovered it prior to seeing it on HN. It makes it clear this is done in a DDG private way (which is one of the things I'm wary about with ChatGPT on its own) and offers multiple models/vendors in one place.

Pretty good! Thumbs up from me.

Why ddg is not focusing on improving or innovating the search ? DDG dosen't even have lens/goggles yet . Can't ddg just try to innovate like marginalia/kagi/Occam.

What is Occam search? Can't seem to find it.

If you could stuff all webpages to a vector database and give us a nice RAG that just responds to questions about anything that could be found on Internet while generating links to the source, that would be even awesomer!

Working on that too. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40088329

A lot of the time you aren't searching for "web pages". You are searching for answers, to get to which you'd have to dig through piles of web pages for an hour. Technology already exists to give you a direct answer in 95% of the time (with references), it just results in fewer ads shown to you, so search engines aren't interested in integrating it properly.

This you-know-better-than-me mindset is why all technology is converging to garbage. I can't speak for OP, but for me, you are half correct: I am indeed ultimately searching for answers, but I want the piles of web pages for an hour, and that is how I will find my answer. I don't like it when systems remove my agency by believing they can correctly predict my intent. (They can't.)

In a lot of cases today’s AI systems can easily predict your intent once they accumulate enough context about you. Not in all, but when they predict incorrectly it’s easy to correct them using natural language. And nobody is removing the option of digging in the pile, it’s just that I don’t see why anyone would want to, in most cases. I certainly don’t - I got better things to do with my time.

But there is no agency being removed here. You are being given more options by adding a button to chat if you so desire. It’s very small and unobtrusive

Ads, sponsoring and SEO spam were also very unobtrusive for a while. A few decades passed and we have to sift trough all the garbage to find anything relevant in our searches, it's very likely that search engines will push harder and harder for these AI assistants while making finding organic content and authoritative sources even harder, resulting in it being nearly impossible to do research by yourself rather then trough an AI that has god knows what bias and perhaps subtle ad driven bias into it.

Take a look at a Google results page from 2009 and then from 2012 onwards. "Unobtrusive" is clearly a matter of opinion.

Sure, it’s subjective, but are you disagreeing that the new DDG chat button is unobtrusive?

There is an inverse relation between sites with ads, and sites that contain useful information that require time to look through. Open access journals, StackExchange, product support messageboards....none of these have ads.

In fact, it's the sites peddling trivial BS that are chock to the brim with ads.

Agreed. Additionally, I don’t actually want to talk to my computer for most use cases. When I do, then I’ll use a dedicated service like ChatGPT, but for most other take, I really really don’t want a chat interface.

I wish these companies would focus on making their core product better instead of spending resources on AI chat interfaces.

management and investors wants AI chat; coincidentally it appeals to the lazy and less-intellectual

> God damn it people. I just want to search the web.

Who's preventing you from doing that?

That now costs $10 (Kagi)

Complex AI for free, basic search for a fee!

I'm a current Kagi subscriber and agree the search is excellent. Unfortunately Kagi is also wasting their time on AI bullshit, so I suspect it's a short-lived oasis.

I became a Kagi subscriber mostly for the "AI bullshit", especially the Summarizer.

I also didn't use Kagi AI until I found out that I get a better deal with them for the rare cases I need to use AI.

I'm quite a fan of how Kagi does it: they'll only give you back AI answers if you end your query with a question mark. For when I'm looking for a fact, it's very helpful and never gets in the way.