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.
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).
I’m trying to figure out how to do that on Brave
The consensus seems to be that we used to be able to, then they left the button that disabled it, but it did nothing.
Then they fixed it by removing the button
I think Chromium based browsers had something where you’d need to open the homepage of the search engine (https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ in this case), right click on the URL in the address bar, and then click “Add search engine name”. Not sure if that still works though.
I believe that also works in Firefox now