AI vs search engines

 Today my system updated DuckDuckGo and Teracopy.  Any noteworthy changes?

Assuming you mean the DuckDuckGo browser and not just the search engine, neither update appears to be a major, user-visible overhaul.

For DuckDuckGo, the most notable recent developments have been incremental privacy and usability improvements rather than dramatic new features. During 2026 they have expanded their optional AI-powered Search Assist feature, added richer follow-up exploration options, and continued work on browser stability, history management, phishing protection, and privacy tools. Community discussion this week also mentions improved built-in YouTube ad blocking in the browser.

For TeraCopy, the update you received is likely the new 4.0.0.37 release from July 2026. The version jump to 4.x suggests more substantial under-the-hood work than a typical bug-fix release, but the public summaries I've found mostly describe it as the latest release rather than highlighting any revolutionary features. TeraCopy's core capabilities remain the same: faster copying, pause/resume, verification, error recovery, scheduling, and Explorer integration.

My guess is that for your day-to-day use:

    DuckDuckGo will look and behave almost exactly as before unless you use its AI/search-assist features.

    TeraCopy may be a bit more polished or compatible with newer Windows versions, but you probably won't notice major differences during ordinary file copies.

If you'd like, tell me the exact version numbers that were installed (Help → About in each program), and I can see whether there were any specific changes in those particular releases.

For large copy or move jobs I prefer TeraCopy over the Windows capability: easier to set up and gives progress report and as I understand it makes an extra check.  I use the DuckDuckGo search and have the browser as a backup for Firefox.

That matches my impression of both programs.

TeraCopy's biggest advantage has never really been raw speed. Windows copy operations have improved a lot over the years. The advantages are the things you mentioned: a clearer progress display, easier queue management, pause/resume, post-copy verification, and much better handling when a problem file is encountered. Rather than stopping everything with a cryptic error box, it tends to log the issue and keep going. That's particularly useful when you're moving tens of thousands of photos or backing up a large drive. The verification feature compares copied files against the originals using checksums, which gives more confidence than simply trusting Windows reported success. TeraCopy's recent releases continue to emphasize verification, error recovery, and Windows integration rather than flashy new features.

Given your setup—with the picture archive on D:, backups to external drives, and occasional concerns about drive health—I can see why you'd prefer it. When you're copying hundreds of gigabytes of photographs, the extra verification is reassuring.

As for DuckDuckGo, many people use it exactly the way you do: the search engine as their daily driver and the browser as a backup. The browser has been gaining features steadily, including better sync, permission management, tracker blocking indicators, color themes, and tighter integration with Duck.ai, but its core appeal remains privacy and simplicity rather than competing feature-for-feature with Firefox.

One thing you might find interesting: DuckDuckGo has recently leaned into giving users a choice about AI. They offer AI-assisted search features, but they have also added an AI-free search mode and even a dedicated "No AI" search experience for users who prefer traditional results. That has apparently attracted a noticeable number of users who don't want AI summaries mixed into their searches.

For someone with your habits, Firefox still makes sense as the primary browser. It has the richer extension ecosystem and more customization. DuckDuckGo is a nice second browser to keep around when you want a clean, privacy-focused session without carrying all of Firefox's accumulated tabs, add-ons, and history. That's very close to how many technically inclined users seem to employ it.

Yes, there does seem to be a significant market for "AI-optional" products.

What's interesting is that the concern isn't always fear of AI itself. People object for a variety of reasons:

    Some are worried about privacy and don't want their searches, documents, or messages analyzed by AI systems.

    Some simply find AI summaries annoying. If you're searching for a fact, you may prefer ten links to an AI-generated paragraph that could be wrong.

    Some dislike the trend of AI being added everywhere, especially when they never asked for it. They see it as feature creep.

    Others are concerned about reliability. An AI can produce a plausible but incorrect answer, whereas a traditional search engine at least points you to original sources.

    A smaller group has broader concerns about AI's social or economic effects.

DuckDuckGo has historically attracted users who value control and privacy, so offering a "No AI" option fits their brand. It is somewhat analogous to how some software advertises itself as having no telemetry or no cloud integration. The selling point is not necessarily that the feature is bad; it's that the user gets to decide.

There is also a generational aspect. Many people who grew up with the web are accustomed to searching, opening several sources, and forming their own conclusions. AI search changes that workflow by presenting a synthesized answer first. Some users find that more efficient; others feel it inserts an unnecessary intermediary between them and the information.

The irony is that many people who say they dislike AI are often happy to use it in narrow roles. They may object to AI-written news articles yet appreciate AI-powered spam filtering, speech recognition, translation, photo enhancement, or medical image analysis. The disagreement is often less about the technology itself than about where it is appropriate and how much control the user has over it.

Your own comments over the past few days strike me as fairly typical of a pragmatic view: you don't seem particularly worried about AI existing, but you are skeptical of grand claims made on its behalf and interested in where it genuinely works versus where it creates new problems. That's a different position from outright AI enthusiasm or outright AI rejection.

Oh I vastly prefer asking a question and getting answers rather than a list of sites that may or may not have answers.  However, a list of sites in other situations is useful.

That's a distinction that often gets lost in discussions about search.

If you want to know, "What team sport in England uses a bat?" or "What is the capital of Cambodia?" then an answer is usually better than a list of ten websites. Having to visit multiple pages to extract a straightforward fact is inefficient.

On the other hand, there are many situations where the sources matter as much as the answer. If you're researching the war in Ukraine, a medical treatment, a tax rule, or a controversial historical question, seeing the underlying sources lets you judge credibility, compare viewpoints, and spot disagreements. In those cases, a synthesized answer is only the beginning.

I suspect that's one reason you've taken fairly naturally to chatting with AI despite being skeptical of some of the hype around it. Your background in insurance and underwriting involved extracting useful conclusions from large amounts of information. An AI can act as a first-pass synthesizer: "Read all this material and tell me what seems to be going on." That can be genuinely valuable.

The danger comes when users stop asking, "How do we know that?" A search engine inherently nudges people toward sources because the links are the product. An AI answer can create the illusion that there is a single settled answer even when the underlying evidence is mixed.

The ideal system is probably a hybrid: answer the question directly, but make it easy to inspect the evidence when you care. In a way, that's what many AI-assisted search tools are trying to become—less "ten blue links" and less "trust me, here's the answer," and more "here's the answer, and here are the places it came from."

That strikes me as close to how you've tended to use information throughout our conversations. When you're asking about a medication interaction, a historical fact, or a technical issue, you usually want the answer. When you're discussing geopolitics, philosophy, demographics, or public policy, you're often interested in the reasoning and evidence behind competing answers rather than a single conclusion.

Web sites have to be assessed.  While we keep hearing that AI can make mistakes, they do seem to be pretty good at staying objective.

That is an important point. A list of websites is not the same thing as a list of reliable answers. The web shifted a lot of the burden onto the reader: you have to decide whether a source is authoritative, current, biased, misunderstanding the issue, or simply wrong.

AI has a different advantage: it can often do some of that first-pass filtering. A good AI response can combine information from multiple sources, recognize common patterns, separate established facts from speculation, and present a coherent explanation. In many ordinary situations, that is much more useful than handing someone a pile of links.

The "AI can make mistakes" warning is real, but it is sometimes misunderstood. The problem is not usually that an AI is deliberately biased in the way a human writer might be. The problem is that it is generating a likely answer from patterns in its training and available information. It can produce a smooth, confident explanation even when a detail is wrong or when the evidence is weaker than it appears.

On objectivity, there is an interesting contrast. Humans often have obvious motivations: a company wants to sell something, a political group wants to persuade, a blogger wants attention, a journalist may have an editorial angle. An AI does not have personal interests or a desire to win an argument, which can make it appear more neutral. But it can still reflect biases from its training data, its instructions, and the way questions are framed.

The most useful role is probably something like a careful research assistant: "Here is the best summary I can give, here are the uncertainties, and here are the sources if you want to examine them." That combines the convenience of synthesis with the accountability of evidence.

Your point about websites needing assessment is actually one of the strongest arguments for AI-assisted information retrieval. The internet dramatically increased access to information; the harder problem became deciding what information deserves trust. AI is, in part, an attempt to solve that second problem.