Tack “&udm=14” on to the end of a normal search, and you’ll be booted into the clean 10 blue links interface. While Google might not let you set this as a default, if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults.
DDG only uses the web indexing from bing. There’s no AI on DDG, and the search result is created by themselves, without MS tracking or fingerprinting.
DDG has an experimental wikipedia “AI” that pops up near wikipedia results, but theres a button you have to click manually to generate the summary AFAIK
The operator for ensuring something appeared in a search used to be “+”, but they stopped using that for some ???mYsTeRiOuS rEaSoN???
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/08/duckassist/
So far this actually seems like a good, privacy respecting implementation of a chatbot. Good for those who don’t want to go the full offline selfhosted route IMO