This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Well, isn't that a shock. What I want to see is 💯 of web searchers avoiding Google.
who knew...
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”
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)
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
DDG is relying on Google to get the results, no?
No. Bing
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
Same.
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.
I just wish they had their own web crawler instead of relying on Microsoft's
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 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.
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
...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.
"search app" is a weird categorization for "web browser."
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.
I can't find anything I'm looking for on Google anymore. It's not a search engine, it's just ads.
DDG still features AI enshittification, but at least one can opt-out... For now.
"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!
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.
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.
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
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.
Until real Americans take their country back from the corrupt pedophile protecting "administration", I mostly avoid US search engines altogether.
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.
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.
I didn't even know they had an app. Why would I need a separate app for a search engine?
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. 😂
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.
