In Firefox and its derivatives, you can add the non-AI version of DuckDuckGo as a search engine by going into Settings > Search > Search Shortcuts > Add and then giving it a name of your choice with https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s being put in the “URL with %s in place of search term” part. You have to remove the 25 part from the URL though, that seems to be a Lemmy quirk with posting a link.
I don’t know when they made this available, but I’m learning about this now and it’s super useful if you hate LLMs and also use a browser that clears cookies on close (such as Mullvad or LibreWolf).
Just as an FYI, if you use suggestions everything you type in your url bar will be sent to your search provider in order to return search suggestions. Even in incognito windows, unless you explicitly disable it.
So I’d suggest only doing that if you really trust your search provider to keep that information secret and not link it to you as a person, and only if search suggestions as a feature are worth that risk to you.
This is an interesting point. They’re going to get the final search string though, so does it matter much if when I search “baked potato recipe” they also get requests for [baked, baked potato, baked potato recipe] (assuming they denounce/split on space/etc) ?
No that doesn’t matter at all, but it might matter to you if they get all the addresses you type just up to the point before you type .com, i.e. pornhub before you add the dot com or maybe some health related stuff, or every bank & insurance company you do business with, adult websites, etc.