DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search
EDIIT :
Apparently, there is an issue with the warning request to disable the ad blocker
I use Fennec F-Droid and Cromite, and I don't see this issue.
to get around the adblocker warning, use this link.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/26/duckduckgo-installs-are-up-30-as-users-reject-being-force-fed-googles-ai-search/Open linkView original on lemmy.nz1433
Comments244
...Installs?
Do they know there's a website?
You don't even need the website. I just set the default search engine to DDG in my browser.
A search app makes zero sense to me.
The reason why companies like to push apps over websites is that apps can gather more information about you. Not saying DDG does this, but it is weird.
For their defense this could be to place search bar on main screen, as looks like Google no longer allows to switch to a different search engine in their default launcher.
The DDG app is pretty cool though. It has free app tracking protection.
As a tangent, it's kind of insane that the NPR app seems to always have like 10x tracking attempts vs tiktok.
So much, this. My brokerage apps are my biggest offenders for phoning to unauthorized parties, makes me nervous as hell.
I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, that I miss using Mullvad but that DDG supplanted them as my VPN of choice, just because there are other anti-tracking and adjacent security Services integrated into my life so seamlessly.
Unrelated to DDG, if you sideload on Android I want to shill HARD for this FDroid package, called Hail, , which when powered with Shizuku can fully suspend apps selectively at will.
So I identify any apps that like to phone home regularly, and just tell them to aggressively take naps until summoned, I feel like I only want to allow 10% of my apps to run to the background regularly. This app gives me a toggle for that, and DDG is my lamp light for selecting the most egregious offenders.
Thanks for the recommendation, probably better than me just putting any app I haven't used in the last week into deep sleep mode or whatever it's called haha.
Surely that doesn't mean you have the NPR app installed, does it?... 🤢
"search app" is a weird categorization for "web browser."
There are too many damn apps already imo, but apparently some people like having as many as possible
Well, in this case it helps to override my default search engine on my phone.
ngl, I never thought about changing the default search engine on Android. That was the last place where I was still using Google.
Installing the DDG app right now 😂
From Chrome to DDG browser likely. Google also have a website but people still install Chrome for it, the lastest AI thing might be the final straw for people to finally looking for the alternative
I think DDO has its own Firefox fork.
Nope, as far as i know it uses chrorium and on android a webview wrapper
In case people don't want to, or can't access, the article. Apologies for any formatting issues, I'm on my mobile.
Last week, after Google announced its huge overhaul to Search, I overheard a woman on the phone saying she was switching to DuckDuckGo because you can “opt out of using AI.”
“Google just isn’t Google anymore,” she said. It seems that others had the same idea.
At I/O, Google’s annual developer conference, the company said its traditional list of blue links is being replaced by an AI agent that answers queries, executes tasks, and runs background monitoring agents.
The backlash has been sharp.
Some have argued it will kill the open web, while others shared concerns that AI overviews surface inaccurate responses and take away control from users who might not want to use AI. It also overcomplicates simple things. Just try to Google the word “disregard.”
In response to Google’s changes, many have begun defecting to DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused alternative that has never been able to break past Google’s dominance, accounting for only around 2% of the U.S. search market.
During Google’s search antitrust trial in 2023, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg testified that Google’s exclusive default search contracts harmed its ability to pitch itself as the default on other browsers.
“Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out,” Weinberg said Tuesday in a statement, referring to Google’s Search overhaul. “As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want.”
Now it seems that DuckDuckGo is beginning to benefit as consumers flee AI.
DuckDuckGo said U.S. app installs went up 18.1% week-over-week on average during the May 20 to May 25 period, compared to May 13 to May 18. The company said that growth was sustained for six consecutive days and peaked at 30.5% on May 25. On iOS, the rate of install is even higher, with week-over-week growth hitting a 33% average, peaking at 69.9%.
The search engine also said visits to its AI-free search page, noai.duckduckgo.com, averaged 22.7% WoW growth, peaking at 27.7% on May 24. The page turns off every AI feature, like AI-assisted answers and AI-generated images, by default.
The company said the trend is stronger in the U.S., and that DuckDuckGo continued to gain users over the Memorial Day weekend, when it usually sees a dip in traffic.
DuckDuckGo offers its own AI product called Duck.ai. It’s free and doesn’t require users to make an account but provides access to models, including Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 4 Scout, Mistral’s Small 3 24B, and OpenAI’s GPT-5 mini. All chats are private because DuckDuckGo strips the user’s IP address before requests reach model providers, deletes conversations within 30 days, and prevents chats from being used for training.
“Not only do we respect user choice, but also user privacy,” Weinberg said. “Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is private; we don’t collect search histories or chats and nothing is used for AI training.”
DuckDuckGo also offers Search Assist, which is similar to Google’s AI overviews, and an AI Image Filter that filters out AI-created images from search results.
Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s chief communications and policy officer, said both of those AI features are among the company’s most popular, despite their differing ethos.
“People just want a choice,” Bazbaz said.
TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment.
Re: DDG AI convos "aren't used for training".
They can't be sure of that. The models themselves could be logging prompts and outputs for training or whatever reason. Only question is if they value those logs, though they could just have their LLM curate them to filter out low quality ones, if the space is even an issue.
If there's no user feedback reaching their servers, there's limited value to be extracted from the logs.
There is feedback that makes it back to their servers: the next prompt.
Though from my understanding, a lot of the agentic tools do a lot of prompt generation, so that would be a weakness of just logging everything and using subsequent prompts to evaluate earlier ones. They'd have no idea whether each prompt is coming from an actual user or another LLM.
Yeah, I was about to say that's a bit of a pipe dream. There's just way too much of a cost to processing prompts by someone else without trying to get something out of them.
More people will probably switch when they figure out they don't need to install anything and can change their default search engine on their current browser.
FTFY
Thank you for this! I changed to duckduckgo just now and it took 5 seconds. Now to see if it works as well as Google.
The bangs are the addictive feature for me. You start by typing
!w lemmyin the URL bar, with DDG already configured as the default search engine, and DDG will directly serve the search result for this term from Wikipedia. There are hundreds of them like!ytfor YouTube or!gmfor Google Maps, and the acronyms are intuitive. https://duckduckgo.com/bangsThis should be a YSK post
O_o I had no idea. This is really useful.
Why... do you need to go through DDG for this? You can just set those custom search engines yourself in the browser without routing through DDG. They let you put any link (with
%sin place of the query's location in the URL) and almost any keybinding. I havewset to attempt to pull up the direct Wikipedia article on the query,cfor Google Contacts,mfor Google Maps (ugh, I've gotta figure out a way outta these Google snares...), etc.Happy to help - feel free to spread the word!
You can also set up the ai-free search, noai.duckduckgo.com, as a custom search engine.
Whoa, that’s great news. Thanks for that!
It doesn't and when you discover that, try Kagi.
People here love things to be free and in doing so, they recommend worse search engines.
I like free but will check it out when I have some money, thanks
Is the search engine open source? Is it self-hostable? If the a answer to both questions, especially the first is no, then it can be easly ignored tbh, and Kagi is also paid so it's really a bad suggestion (unless you mention it), people ain't gonna switch from free to paid that easly.
I have to pay someone and then hope that they don't sell my data? Hell nah;
Before you say anything releated to DDG: no, i am not saying you should choose DDG, that it's the better decision, the next best search engine, what i said is unreleated to DDG specifically
Well, I think its different for different users, with different economy and different motivations.
Kagi has 70000 paying members, enough to be profitable without any ads or tracking. Since the results are literally Googles results but without ads, AI results or tracking, it's worth paying for for some people who can.
Ive been a paying member since 2023 and I feel good about supporting alternatives to Google with some lunch money. :) Because of me and the other users, there is a quality search engine that makes us happy and makes a profit without ads.
But we are all different. When I was a teenager I wouldn't have paid for this. Had no money and wanted my money for other things.
Next time i suggest to at least mention that kagi is paid, i say it mainly because many users will not catch that immediatly (me included, i understood it only after i made the account, and only because i saw the max querys i could do or smth else i don't remember rn) so you avoid to waste people's time that aren't interessed, i see many people that don't mention it but i think it's essential
that is on level that i meanwhile believe 90% of people can't handle or even understand
For what it’s worth, DDG recognized this immediately.
They dipped their toe in AI search, felt the pushback, and went all-in on putting toggles and immediately accessible opt-outs everywhere. They put a filter for AI images (and I hope they do the same for AI SEO spam).
In other words, they actually leaned in and listened to their own users. Unlike the soulless vampire on a throne Google has become.
While their first party browser convinced me if it's privacy capabilities, I need extensions (yes, recognizing that makes me much more fingerprintable) so I use their browser less than 1% of the time.
However, I have subscribed for their premium Services because I already trust their anti-tracker on my mobile devices and they have sufficient number of VPN nodes to be useful to me (I do miss Mullvad, and probably will use them when I'm traveling International, but it is getting harder to find good nodes and they don't have servers in south Korea at all, either).
And their measures to make a neutered and neutral AI interface is the first time I've ever paid for general AI access, finding it's helped some of my efforts as AI has been a necessary component for building my home studio and mini rack. I'm scared that my brain has already been ruined, acclimating to Google's integration of Bard and then later Gemini, and I make a regular exercise of hunting for sites that have articles or discussions that will help me work through tech projects and puzzles "the hard way" with just vanilla search queries and amendments.
I love that DDG's tech stack seems to play well in the general broader ecosystem, so it's my search engine of choice for all of my Gecko/Fusion browsers (Fennec, WaterFox, LibreWolf, and occasionally, full-fat vanilla Firefox).
I had really thought I could grow into using Kagi but I couldn't make it make sense for myself. When you're limiting paid subscribers at the first tier to 300 general web queries a month, and i could consume that many just on correcting my own typos and re-searches alone, DDG was a better investment for me for the time being.
TL;DR - I love that these guys play well with others, so I'll even pay for the access because I need them to still exist in a decade.
+1 for Kagi's base tier limit. It's just not close to enough.
At the very least, I'd be far more approving if they didn't make me pay for a separate 300 AI searches I'd never use. If it was just "600 searches, of any type" or even just "300 searches, of any type" that would be far more acceptable.
It's more than enough some types, but I agree, probably not the average lemmy user. I'm happy enough with their search results to pay for a higher tier.
While I do appreciate this, their search results aren't great. I hate to say this, but even with horrible AI forward results, Google still returns better and more relevant results. I'll still use ddg first but it generally leaves me wanting.
Usually if I search anything seriously, like for work, I use journals that require a subscription that I access through my institution. If I'm trying to find a funny meme, that's different. Google is fine for the casual stuff, but since I just don't like them DuckDuckGo seems like an acceptable alternative even though I've found it slightly less effective.
I always default to DDG, and it gets me what I need 80% of the time. If not, do the search again with !g at the end and DDG will forward the search to Google
Yeah I tried switching to ddg and ecosia several times and had the same experience, especially for technical searches. I’m trying Kagi right now and it seems better, but haven’t done too many technical ones yet, so we’ll see on that front
"install" websites, i'll never understand
We've come full-circle. I used to download .html pages so I could browse them while offline. Now websites install themselves so they can browse you while offline.
In capitalist America, the content watches you!
Too many people are brain hostages to the idea that apps do everything and you need an app for everything, even though most of the things are just websites. But all the apps are really doing is spying while they deliver their version of the website.
I bought a literal thermometer, not a thermostat just a thermometer, which I wanted to log temperatures, and it insisted on me downloading an app and then setting up a free account. Noped out of that s*** and left caustic reviews but it was impossible to use without a smart device, without internet access, and without the invasion of privacy.
Just repeat that story a hundred times and you're describing modern domestic life.
I thought it meant changing your default search engine.
I never considered that it was an app.
Everything is an app.
I "love" when the wrong technology is applied.
On the the dawn of the smartphones Mozilla tried to enter the space with an FirefoxOS and the pitch was that every app was just a website just more tightly integrated with the phone. The problem is that all the web stack is wonderfully resource hog and at the time phones were super underpowered running websites were not optimized in a browser that were not as optimized as today. So it was a terrible choice for the time being.
Other good one was Android early days. They choose Java as the default app environment and development. It kinda makes sense to use it if you want the same program to run on different platforms, the problem, again, it runs worst and with the underpowered devices of the time everything was a slog. And they doubled down on the mistake by using a garbage collector that doubled the memory usage of every app. The cherry on top, at least in hindsight is that arm was and still is the de facto Android plataform, greatly disminishing the advantage of using Java/JVM. And today Google enabled apps with native code optimized for specific plataforms, but everyone only care about ARM so of you try to run Android like in an Intel laptop a lot of apps are not compatible.
End of rant.
Hey dude, just wanted to say that I learned a little bit from you today. Thanks for sharing on here.
I remember Apple famously disallowing any kind of "Write Once, Run Anywhere" platform tech at the dawn of iOS, ATVos and iPad OS, quite openly trying to fuck with Adobe's and Sun's shit.
But using apps to avoid needing all of the traffic and rendering capabilities for modern websites was key in its early days and I remember even 10 years ago recommending to clients and customers that were stuck with awful internet connections or underpowered devices, to try using the apps instead of the websites for things.
Nowadays, I only want to visit so many corpo resources strictly through a browser and fighting tooth and nail to avoid ever letting their apps on my phones. I would literally fire a bank for not having a functional Web page to do what I need done , especially since I probably can't be on vanilla android for much longer the way things are going and too many secure apps require Google Play services for their circle of trust.
There's a DDG privacy first browser on Android. This is probably what they are referring to.
I didn't even know they had an app. Why would I need a separate app for a search engine?
It’s a browser.
Oh I didn't know they had a browser. Interesting.
It’s good on mobile, but the desktop seems useless because I have Firefox/Waterfox
it's my default browser on mobile. only after using it did i realize that i rarely need data stored, be it cookies or history. go to a site, read whatever, press the flame button to burn the session. for sites you want to keep you can "fireproof" them as well. ezpz
Yeah.
DDG mobile's "privacy ergonomics" are perfect. Every browser should be structured like that.
I mostly use Orion for other reasons, but I still use DDG a good bit.
what's Orion?
Not anymore, it's a slopp-machine.
Was talking about Google search... Lmao
I think they're talking about DDG, not google
I can't find anything I'm looking for on Google anymore. It's not a search engine, it's just ads.
Disable my AD blocker.... Na I'd rather not read the article
With ublock it opens normally. Also by disabling javascript, which is kinda ironic
Luckily 10 minutes after you posted that, another commenter posted the full article in plain text, in the comments here.
I've defaulted to ddg for like 2 years now. Solid. Good enough. Really what happened is that SEO optomization websites even before the AI craze made Google search so awful that ddg became just as good if not better for me than google
Google literally redesigned their search engine to be worse so that you would scroll through more ads to find the results you want. On average, the best result now is the fifteenth result.
That's what happens when the engineers are forced out and the marketers are given control.
Same here and I recently purchased a degoogled Fairphone 6.
i would love a degoogled phone, but i also lose my wallet fucking everywhere around the house (I swear, it goes in one spot but then it's time for a clown drum circle and i can't find my wallet for a week because i cleaned the damn house) so like i have gotten used to some creature comforts recently. you know how it goes.
Same.
I let the default fall to DDG on some of my machines. I find they're a better experience for 80% of searches. The rest are not handled well by any modern search engines and only Google in verbatim mode (and surprisingly Kagi) come close to delivering good results for those. I hope DDG improves and the team there sees the market forces that are essentially driving customers towards them. We don't want AI shit, just good, non-evil, search.
I just wish they had their own web crawler instead of relying on Microsoft's
Its not crazy hard to install your own searxng instance. Works pretty well. The problem is that the Internet itself is turning into AI slop.
Dude I don't even know what that is or what it does and I'm pretty sure most people don't either. It might be easy but what the heck even is it?
It let's you have one search website where you have it pull results from all other search engines (that you want) and then it can rank results based on where things rank on the various engines.
Tl;dr self hosted search proxy, with some advanced features
Well that's neato, thanks for sharing
Check out yacy, its not well polished but at least it doesn't rely on major search engines afaik (p2p)
The problem with your own searxng instance is that your searches across other engines come from your IP address.
So if you're searching for something, everyone knows it's you using IP triangulation. Google then tracks you around the internet.
If that doesnt bother you, OK great.
You could install a proxy to expose their IP instead of your i guess
Sure, but it's a buyer beware kind of thing.
Last time I tried I had issues but it was quite a while ago. Do you know a good guide or something you can post?
I hate to say it, but I just had Claude generate the guide. The docker container is the easiest way I think.
Fair enough, I'll look into it!
I have it installed in a docker container in Linux both as a search 3ngine for my local AI setup, and for regular browsing.
Setup and installation is a great use case for AI.
Go to Google gemini, and ask it to create a step by step guide to install a container with searxng, and how to allow searches from your browser(s). Make sure you tell gemini that you are a simple user, not a power user, so it shouldn't assume anything. Also ask it to make sure it shows you how to make the container autostart with the pc. Tell gemini that you want this in a step by step tutorial.
Should make it easy, as you can ask questions if you get stuck, or something doesn't work.
Unfortunately the internet will still enshittify with a speed we cannot yet imagine
I like Duckduckgo been using it a while, they have a tor based search page as well which is another thing I like.
Wouldn't say they are anti-ai but at least you get the option to turn it off.
Best you can hope for these days, really.
The phone app I use to turn my lights on and off is now calling itself an "AI life assistant" and has an AI prompt box front and center that I can't get rid of. But at least I can ignore that and still use the real function. Which, to be clear, is a fucking light switch. I use this app exclusively for turning a single light on or off. It does not need a LLM 'assistant' built in. But that's just what you get these days -- it's shoved into everything.
Apparently I'm the Luddite here for sticking with the light switch on the wall that has always just worked. ;p
I exaggerate slightly, I guess. It turns the light on and off and also changes colors.
It's definitely possible to do color changing LED lighting without an app. Half of my room is lit that way, and I love it. But it's more expensive and more complicated to install, so when I went for a second light, I just went with the app-controlled bullshit.
If you self-host stuff and plan to buy more "smart" things or IoT devices try this: https://www.home-assistant.io/
Neither, really.
After this, if I install another color-changing light, I'll again go through the trouble of setting up one with 'dumb' analog controls for it. The other LED light in my room simply has three knobs that can be adjusted -- one each for red, blue, and green. It was significantly more expensive, and had to be wired up by hand, but after trying both I very much prefer that kind of control.
That's also an option with google, you know.
I did not know that. How does one go about doing so?
People refer to this as the "udm=14" trick. Edit your search engine settings/add one (Firefox made this harder than it needs to be) so that the url is
https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%25s, and it will always display the "web" page first, which have zero "automatic" content on it; only a list of sites. At least for now.Or, use udm14.org, although it's adding yet another site in the mix, which is unnecessary.
I'm reading this within two hours of setting up and playing around with my own local SearXNG instance. I'm glad people are utilizing a more privacy respecting platform, but too bad it's more about "God! Fuck this AI shit, get it out of my face!" more-so than people taking control of their own privacy.
Don't get me wrong though, "God! Fuck this AI shit, get it out of my face!" is the appropriate response.
Searxng is cool but I find myself needing to constantly tweak the container, Google keeps blocking access
I just run an update when that happened and it fixes itself.
Yes, in the last few months they got it right. But there was a long period, maybe half a year where they could not get Google search to work
Not to sound too facetious, but is that really a negative these days?
It just is nice to have Google results in there. I find that's the coolest part of searxng, showing when the different indexers corroborate each other as important.
My friend just told me ddg is now better than google search
The thing that is hilarious about this is that DDG is powered by Bing. 😂
The thing about THAT is Bing built their house literally copying Google's homework. In the early days (maybe 2013? Long before they went masks-off) google published examples of them inventing new unique words that didn't organizational exist in open web pages, and those popping up and Bing search indexes 3 weeks later.
Kagi, at least according to a few talks Doctorow of the EFF gave in recent history, admit their indices just came from Google's as well.
Watching everyone's favorite advertising agency turn heal so swiftly has been one of the biggest bummers of my adult life.
Now? It's been better than Google for a while. Google's results have been bad for a long time.
DDG still features AI enshittification, but at least one can opt-out... For now.
This was my thought when I briefly reinstalled the browser, the AI mode seems very similar to what google announced at their I/0 con
'just duckduckgo it'
Duck it, we'll search it live
Those who enable and finance the pedophiles are international... they won't disappear when Trump dies, they have old money and are multigenerational. Trump is just a stooge for international interests, like Epstein was.
See Deutsch Bank, for example... they financed Trump with billions of dollars, and broke the law to do so. Without them, Trump would not be President today.
Also, look at the funders of organizations like The Heritage Foundation; coincidentally, many members are shared between them and the Council on Foreign Relations. All of this will remain when Trump is gone.
Ok...
I don’t even care about an ai overview at the top. Give me a search engine that ranks down the sea of blogs that launched a year ago and have 5,000+ articles that are just ai generated bullshit designed to capture as many search queries as possible
Ecosia, ddg, google, brave, etc are all laden with this shit and it clogs up the searches. “How do I do x” and an endless stream of “achieving x is possible. Here’s a bulleted list of the next 12 paragraphs, then a bunch of summarized info from Reddit posts that only answers your question in the most basic obvious way and has no accounting for any kind of edge case or even just non traditional but acceptable use case. And even if you just wanted the basic answer its useless because the LLM fluffed the sentence long answer with 12 pages of meandering nonsense”
Search for an item get a "19 best options for item in MAY 2026", click, blurb & amazon links!
Just ignore anything written the last two years basically
I definitely de-emphasize it, but eventually the slop is going to sink down to the lower layers of the internet
Ai is fucking great at SEO. But maybe it's time for a new system
Yeah it's hijacked so many of our old (admittedly tenuous) trust systems.
The worst being that a piece of detailed "content" is evidence that a human being cared enough about something to put effort into making it.
I don't even mind people summarizing into they've found elsewhere, but like you said it's the most basic information—it's the opposite of summarizing, it's whipping up this lexical froth of bullshit filler around a tiny kernel of a factoid.
Meandering nonsense exactly. Just plausible enough for you to keep reading, and probably impressive to someone who doesn't know the domain, but as soon as you try to logically put together what you've read it falls apart.
The frustrating part is that getting around it sucks. I’m told Kagi has better support for this but from what I’ve read it relies on users downranking the domains, which is a fools errand given the flood of these sites. I’ve also seen people that maintain blocklists for this that work with things like adguard and uBlock but then you still get pages of slop, but all the links just 404 now
My conspiracy is that this is allowed and not dealt with to push people to use LLMs directly, which are quickly becoming the most effective way to search for information online (with the caveat that you either need to have the knowledge to identify errors or be willing to double check the information given for flaws. Also taking like 4-7x the energy to process queries)
DDG isn't the holy grail people make it out to be; it has contracts with Microsoft and we all know how Microslop likes AI.
No, they're not, but they are one of the better-known alternatives to Google, and they do advocate privacy. This, in itself, is a good thing and should be promoted.
The problem is that Google's monopoly on web search is so large that using Google is the de facto standard for the vast majority of people. Getting them to acknowledge that there are alternatives to Google benefits privacy on the internet more than DDG having contracts with MS harms it.
DuckDuckGo literally uses Bing for search results.
Why should I literally care?
What's the alternative? The basically unusable Mojeek? Rawdogging Bing? SearXNG?
Qwant and Ecosia teamed up to make a European indexer/web crawler. They're still using Bing to pad the result quality for now but slowly phasing out reliance on Bing from what I understand.
Still, they also push AI so can use this argument:
https://www.qwant.com/?llm=0
Ecosia have to use cookies unfortunately to disable AI overview:
https://www.ecosia.org/settings
Switching from Google to MS/Bing isnt really much of a privacy win.
Switching from a search engine that heavily tracks you to a search engine that doesn't is a privacy win.
Think microslop doesn't track you? Think again.
I'm not sure if I correctly get your point: DDG provides search results based on Bing and has advertisment contracts with MS but DDG in itself doesn't track you:
From DDGs FAQ:
Rule of thumb is to not take their word as gospel. All social media also present themselves as being concerned about your privacy when they are anything but.
Search engine ad set-ups include trackers typically.
Okay, I get it. So do you propose that we simply don't trust any company, or do you especially mistrust DDG? If you specifically mistrust DDG, do you have a good alternative?
If you mistrust companies in general: I get where you're coming from, but I also think it's highly impractical to distrust basically everyone on the Internet because you have to use their services at some point.
I wouldn't use DDG's Android app, though, because it doesn't block Microsoft trackers. Now we can debate whether this means the app doesn't block MS trackers on MS websites or if it allows tracking on its own website (which would contradict the claim I cited above).
I hate that ddg has "show AI images" on by default
But I like that it has that toggle at least
It's great it even has a toggle.
You can use https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ to avoid AI all together.
Good thing it takes one click to disable and it's right in your face too
Ironically, duck.ai is also the only AI provider I use because on top of having multiple models available, it has no login requirement so I just ask whatever stupid question and be on my way.
Thats depressing. % stats like this always oversell it. There are probably not many people installing duckduckgo so a 30% increase is a small handful of users. I'd expect like 500% if there was actual pushback.
Unfortunatly there will not be an actual pushback, because most people will always prefer convinience above almost anything else.
Even facts.
I know so many people who will use ChatGPT fully knowing it might be wrong. They dont care.
Scary, right?
Or that it's a supremely scummy and buggy, even compared to other LLM frontends.
I for one don't install any search engines. I don't see a point in doing so.
Hey does anyone else remember the days of helping your relatives figure out why their computer is so slow and you fire up their browser and see like nine search bars installed?
50 million+ installs on Android, so it's not a tiny number.
Thats way more than I expected when I made the comment and I think that changes my opinion on it being a small amount.
That's great but...are people really downloading an app to search? Or are they talking about DDG browser?
AI probably told them it was the easiest way
Shoutout to https://uruky.com/
It's a paid private search engine.
https://theprivacydad.com/interview-with-the-engineer-of-uruky-a-private-search-engine/
Trying them out right now, so far so good!
I appreciate their comparison to Kagi also notes Kagi's strengths.
I never bother to disable AI in duckduckgo so I just use a search engine that doesn't have it out of the box
It's not even about disabling it, DDG keeps turning it back on.. I live in a constant battle.
Which is crazy as they also made a big deal about how many users don't want an AI result and how they are credibly the choice for those people.
I get offering the feature, but insisting upon it while also bragging about how they cater to the majority of respondents that didn't like it is bizarre..
Google at least is consistent, they just plainly act as of the people who dislike it don't exist.
are you sure it's not resetting because of your privacy settings
Clearing cookies will reset it because there is no way of ddg to know.
I just tested it. It stores a cookie when you disable duck.ai and Search Assist but no cookie corresponds to them being enabled. Perhaps you might have cleared cookies?
Yeah, I'm aware this is the reason. Which fucking sucks because I need to remember turn them back off every single time I happen to need clear cookies.. But that's probably their plan.
You could set up an exception for that website to not have its cookies cleared when you wipe the rest
I have Firefox and have it set up to erase all history and cookies. I just like a clean and cleared browser when I get on. To prevent myself from having to log in to every website I might need to use that day, I took all of my websites I go to regularly, and made a container for them in Firefox Containers. Then, I go into Firefox settings and paste the websites into the Exceptions under Browsing data.
This has worked for me for years, so I hope you try it out and it works for you too! :-]
Setting this up took some time, but now I think I got this working.. Thank you my dude/tte!
Awesome! I'm glad you were able to get it going, and thank you for the follow up! It makes me happy when I can actually help another soul out! Fox on, my friend! :-]
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
For searches https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&kax=-1&q=
Are you suuuuuuurrrreeeeeeeee you don’t want it turned back on?
Try https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
That works as the starter page, but can't be set as the custom search engine.. Only the real DDG can be set as that.
// EDIT; user-error
I've set it as a custom search engine in Firefox by appending the usual '?q=%s'. Seems to work fine here?
.......... Thanks.
Which do you recommend?
Mojeek is a good one. Qwant is another, but it does have a 'Flash Answers' box that you can disable and it will stay disabled. My browser has it disabled by default, though.
If you're wedded to google you can use udm14.com and it will remove the AI, ads, and knowledge panels.
I use Startpage. Also if you have Firefox check out the search engines that come preinstalled
Thank you for making me discover unwall !
I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine and have for a while. But I have noticed lately that every time I search for something, it almost always only returns product pages. I don't know if this is effective SEO or a way of DDG monetizing their search. But unfortunately I've been looking for alternatives just because it's so frustrating when searching for information to get nothing back but a bunch of sites trying to sell you their product.
Yeah I'm not a big fan of DDG either... it's powered by Bing so hardly surprising it isn't great. And Microsoft isn't any less evil than Google.
Presearch is the best I've found - just a nice, basic search - but it's a little slow and has some cryptoshit background so I'm open to alternatives. Ecosia is greenwashing bullshit afaik.
ecosia literally isn't greenwashing
It literally has an AI function lmao
The environmental search engine has an environment-killing function that no one needs. They also partner with Google and Microsoft, both avid environment-murderers.
But yeah sure bro, plant a few trees, that'll offset everything I'm sure.
And their search results are powered by Bing, so it won't be any better than DDG anyway.
The amount of absolutely undue shit ddg got for innovating on par with literally every other search engine is ridiculous.
Kagi introduced the same AI search and got exactly zero shit.
I don't keep up with the drama. I use Kagi and disabled the AI. Simple as that. Does DDG make it easy to disable?
Yes a simple one time settings toggle
or https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
the search box on that page can be added to the browser's search engine choices.. in firefox, right click it and 'add search engine'
Assuming this is about duck.ai, I didn't know they got shit for it. People I've talked to generally enjoy having that option available. It's free and about as private as you can get with the current LLM chatbots, unless you self host one yourself.
At least until Confer gets off the ground. Once that happens, I'm hoping DDG switches to a similar model
https://confer.to/blog/2026/01/private-inference/
I've seen Kagi get plenty of shit online for their AI features.
I consider the people paying to use Kagi, which simply uses Bing indexers included in its search results because there is no way in hell any company can have the infrastructure/resources/money to index the entire internet for the last 30 years other than Google and Microsoft, in the same boat of people who purchased NFT tokens of an image.
I don’t know what to tell you other than they offer the best search results and AI in the game
That's a bit of a stretch?
People who pay for Kagi likely tried the trial and found the results to be far enough better than google/microslop that they are willing to pay for the ongoing service. Or they want to support a business model that isn't based around the advertising industry, so that someday Kagi can realistically compete with the incumbents. I don't need to search for things often enough to justify the cost, but I know people who use it for work and consider it to be worth the cost.
Meanwhile people who bought NFTs thought that they could sell a copy of a digital image for lots of money.
They don't track you, but you just need to be logged in to make your searches and just trust them not to collect data
I don't know man, I'm just paying for a service that works better than the mainstream free alternatives.
...I really should have sold my NFTs earlier, though.
My NFTs will be worth something one day! /S
Does Bing even have an API anymore? I thought they mainly use Brave and Yandex now and some other smaller ones
DDG is not too bad, but when I click the sources from the AI search results, they often don’t contain the info from the search summary, so why even have it if it’s mostly a hallucination?
Because:
🎇 ✨ +10 Line go up! 🎇 ✨
If you use the Voyager app, you can turn on “Always use reader mode” in the settings. It strips away the JavaScript and you won’t see those annoying messages.
It works it 95% of the articles, but there are a few that still have issues.
Thank you for this. 🩷
Edit: not that Apple is a huge turd and it seems you must use safari for this work work on iOS
I need to get a Linux phone
Editx2:
Incredible. I’m dine with the internet today.
I’m using Firefox Focus on iOS and an Pi-Hole and it works fine. I get a popup but there’s a “Continue us without supporting” link.
I think something you’ve got installed actually breaks the webpage. Not saying it’s your fault—I blame bad web design still.
Obligatory actual direct link (it's just a common sense subdomain): noai.duckduckgo.com
Installs? it's a website...
They have a browser app as well for mobile
And a desktop browser too
I just searched earlier and DDG had a link telling me to try its AI (I think it was on my mobile on firefox). At least it didn't force it, I guess.
yep, me too. you can put "-ai" at the end of your search to shut off the slop, but it's a PITA. Often I'll just go to DDG.
Still I prefer ecosia
I hope this takes off so DDG improves their search engine. I've tried to switch, but 2/3 of the time the results are off target and I end up back at Google anyway.
I tried ddg too and wasn't super happy, especially not when searching in a different language. I switched to Qwant and I'm very happy with it so can recommend trying that. There are other search engine options as well
I've been using it for a couple of year now and I only double check Google maybe 1% of the time. And most of those times, I also can't find what I am looking for on Google. I also can't go back after getting used to the ! commands.
I’m the same. I use Google maybe 1-2 times a year and only after exhausting my search terms in DDG, most of the time Google also can’t find what I’m looking for.
That's Bing's fault.
I use duckduckgo for simple searches and google when it's something more complicated. I don't like google tho, too nosy and too much ads.
I can.
"Google" is a taken-for-granted utility to most people. It's a verb. It's kinda like saying "rain isn't rain anymore," as it's just always been a part their lives, until it changed out of the blue, enough to break their routine.
who knew...
i remember googling a script how to code in a something google engine with a -noai into my firefox. not one week passes and that search extension has somehow turned into an ai exclusive search engine swear to, uh, fuck. i forgot i can't believe i legitimately have to look this one up. Hieronymous Theodor Richter and Ferdinand Reich, gods of me breaking electronics whenever i walk into the fucking room. my religion is getting so goddamned weird my wife is right. anyways that was when i stopped using google for good and using duckduckgo. but even the duckduckgo-noai bullshit script did that, i did all the antivirus malwarebytes bullshit swear to... fuck. Hieronymous Theodor Richter and Ferdinand Reich. I really should have picked people to engodden with shorter and easier to remember names, like Pierre Jules Cesar Jannsenn. Anysays, i just ended up having to make a duckducklogin and tell it no ai which doesn't that defeat the purpose of going from the duck?
Well, isn't that a shock. What I want to see is 💯 of web searchers avoiding Google.
If you change your region to France on Google it doesn’t give you the default AI results.
I'd rather have AI results than to associate myself with the French
The fuck is your problem with the French?
I guess the joke was not obvious after all
It was not. Still isn't. What was the joke? I'm really in the woosh territory here...
We Europeans usually joke about hating the French. We don't mean it.
DDG is relying on Google to get the results, no?
No. Bing
Not much better tbh. These sort of proxy like search engines, I don't like
Oh yeah wasn't that coming out today? How'd that go?
Are people already getting these AI-only, blue-link-less Google results? Mine are still normal.
Afaik they are rolling out the whole thing gradually over this summer. For now I think it triggers AI only results occasionally. Give it a few months.
I got it once, and didn't like it one bit.
And I'm long time user of local LLMs. I use Google AI Studio sometimes. But that's just "AI" precisely when and where I do not want it.
yeah that's what i meant
It's also the search engine that doesn't bitch if you use a VPN
I haven't used Google for about three years now, other than to compare it to DDG results now and then.
They are not the same, in spite of the claims of others on Lemmy.
DDG does have an AI assistant that you can turn off (allegedly). This is on Firefox browser, Windows OS.
I recently used google for the first time in ages. "This bs sucks" was my first reaction. My understanding ist that we are slowly being trained (or callibrated) by the search engines we use.
In any case, you are expecting to get maps directly from the search engine? Why you dont just look for what you want directly in google maps? Silly automation is what made google rubbish.
LibeWolf is, once again, my response.
LibreWolf is really great and something I use myself, but AFAIK it is a browser, not a search engine.
I was leaning more towards it already has duck duck go as it’s default search and is not a chromium based browser.
Or do the udm 14 trick
As long as this work. I'm using that, because it gives me actual, useful results most of the time, but there's always a chance that google pulls the plug on that someday.
I love how that article calls normal search results "old-school." Hate this timeline
brave search also have the option to turn it off ehich is very nice
Brave is a garbage browser
You can use Brave search without using Brave. It's also, to my knowledge, the only major search engine that doesn't use google or microsoft.
There's also searx and that paid one but I don't have any desire to log into a search engine so my results can be logged either 🫠
I made a video on Google alternatives a month or so ago. There are chapters in the description if you want info but don't want to watch.
I've been quite happy to use the AI stuff actually. I've asked lots of random questions and within seconds it comes up with answers. Jesus should we go back to having to type in the specific web address to find everything !?
http/:www.whatdhfuckamitypingallthisoutfor?
Each to their own. Go in peace.
It doesn't matter how fast it is if the answer is wrong, and it does seem to be wrong an awful lot. I will check their citations to see if they back up their output, and many times they do not.
Uh, no? Just use a search engine? You remember those, right?
AI in Google reminds me of browser ads back in the day, something that became more and more intrusive until I made an effort to block it. I got into a bad habit of reading the AI answer, then having to remind myself that it was just words thrown together using probability which is why it was wrong so often. I tend to search for obscure things that the AI has limited exposure to, and it will make shit up rather than admit it can't find something.
Yes, you should inconvenience yourself with the weighty first-world burden of having to press a few buttons for access to the full library of mankind's knowledge in order to avoid using a product which is inherently destructive to the one and only planet currently available for our species to inhabit.
Hope that helps. Fuck peace, go in love, including the love of a mother bear to destroy what threatens those she loves.
You probably don't remember since you've been eating glue at an LLM's advice, but search engines have existed for a while, and even worked at one point!