Bingo, this is exactly how I use AI personally. There’s just too much SEO spam to wade through on search results anymore, and Google’s AI Mode RAG is pretty good at citing trustworthy sources when I want to dive in.
DuckDuckGo’s equivalent feature is unfortunately too prone to hallucination, especially whatever cheap model they are using for AI summaries. Once you click in it switches to GPT Luna, which will sometimes hilariously correct the previous response.
how i have been using it 'at home'. its ok conversationally. It honestly is a very 'mid' search engine. Sometimes it can zoom right onto what I want. Other times it gets very fixated on the 'wrong thing' and you have to club it into expanding its view. It just randomly gets 'lost' and you have to nudge it along to actually dig in. even then even if you explicitly tell it to review its sources it will just kinda ignore the request and keep going.
Yeah, I try to use DDG as my "default" search but it's just all around mediocre compared to Google. Even simple dumb things like "image search for a meme I remember that I want to post on bsky": Google has it near top result, DDG doesn't even have it on the first SRPs for the same query.