Disabling AI Results in DuckDuckGo
So DuckDuckGo has introduced AI assisted search results. I find them infuriating and never want to see them again. DuckDuckGo says that if I click the "Never See AI Results Again" button I will not see any more... until I clear browser cookies. This policy is insane. DuckDuckGo is supposed to be the privacy-conscious search engine. Some significant fraction of their users practice reasonable privacy hygiene like (a) logging into websites as infrequently as possible, (b) using private browsing by default, (c) having cookies self-destruct and clearing them as frequently as possible. Thus the AI-hating, privacy conscious DuckDuckGo user can look forward to seeing AI results every time they restart their browser, which is too frequently.
DuckDuckGo has some
switches that you can include with your
searches. There does not seem to be one to turn off AI results
forever. Maybe the kz switch will help? I am not sure, because
there is another way.
If you visit https://html.duckduckgo.com you will see a DDG page that is less ugly than https://lite.duckduckgo.com but seems to include search results without all the other nonsense. Using these instructions you can set the HTML-only version of DuckDuckGo as a custom search engine in Firefox. (TL;DR: in the address bar, right-click and you will see the search engine with a small green plus sign. Click on that. Then make that new search engine the default in settings.)
One downside of this is that the HTML version does not include tabs for image and video results. If you care about those then maybe you can use the fancy DuckDuckGo.
Another downside is that the https://ddg.gg shortcut that is baked into my muscle memory will go to the AI-laden version of DuckDuckGo and not the HTML-only one.
The real solution is probably to switch search engines but I am not there yet. Paying Kagi for search seems to be the new hotness, but I am a miserly skinflint. Maybe there is a zero-cost search engine that is better, but I have not tried this out at all.