13 ms·

DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode

1075 points by HelloUsername 4mo ago

John7878781 4mo ago
AI mode isn't that terrible.
- jeffbee 4mo ago
  AI summary isn't bad at all, but people don't understand it and Google hasn't explained it very well. It is just RAG. It is a summarization of the documents that are on the first page of the SERP. People think it is answering their question independently, but that's not what it does. It takes the docs that are top ranked from web search and digests them. The corresponding "AI overview" feature of Gmail is amazing. It digests the messages that match your search. Because it is using your own docs, the output is way better. Or, at least, mine is. Maybe your inbox is full of lies but mine isn't.
  - josefritzishere 4mo ago
    People understand it. They dislike it. Users want what they want. When Software companies purport to know better... they do themselves and their customers a disservice.
brikym 4mo ago
So a tiny fraction of people left Google to DDG? Seems like they both win.
256BitChris 4mo ago
From my experience the Google AI mode is more restrictive on what it will let you search for and the content it produces. I personally have had to use DuckDuckGo to search for things that Gemini finds to be against its instructions to answer. And I'm not talking about things that are NSFW, but some things that Gemini just doesn't want to discuss. That's kinda Gemini's problem in general, it just is overly restrictive and doesn't like to talk about anything things that Claude will freely talk about and push against and discuss with you.
- rvnx 4mo ago
  You are absolutely right, DuckDuckGo is better for porn than Google, but if you want even better results you can use Yandex. For other things, Grok is quite fast — Perplexity too
al_borland 4mo ago
My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they hate AI being pushed so hard. One was just messaging me this morning about alternatives to Google search and maps. He ended up downloading DuckDuckGo. If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
- dylan604 4mo ago
  Search is not the golden goose. Ads are. If search was the golden goose, they wouldn't be trying so hard to replace it with AI. Just because Google used to do search as their main point of business does not mean that holds true today. Holding on to the false premise will only add to your confusion about their decisions.
  - jeffwask 4mo ago
    They only dominate Ads because they dominate search if everyone leaves Search the ad business grinds to a halt as well. These are the ying and yang of Google.
    - dylan604 4mo ago
      Kind of. They dominate ads because the dominated search when they bought the successful ads company. By that point in time, they already had your profile built, and the further use of search just continues to enhance that profile. But now that ads has its own persistent tracking that dependence on search is not as strong as it used to be
      - jeffwask 4mo ago
        People have reported a decrease in ROI from spending on Google ads already when they no longer control all the eyes and where you rank in what those eyes see when they search, that ROI will drop even more. People will stop paying for Google ads when the ROI is higher on other platforms. Couple that with the fact that a lot of folks have moved their search to GPT or Claude once those platforms start taking in ad money... that budget will come from somewhere and that's likely existing Google ad buy dollars shifting.
mt_ 4mo ago
As someone who has been driving DDG for the past 6 years, i have switched to Google back due to the new AI mode,, its such a nice quick way to check information and validate ideas.. no friction included.
wotsdat 4mo ago
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Legend2440 4mo ago
Both statements can be true, you know. Some people can love AI mode while others hate it.
- huflungdung 4mo ago
  [dead]
root-parent 4mo ago
"Google’s AI Overviews Don't Have an Off Switch. 4 Tricks to Return to Traditional Web Results" - https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/googles-ai-overviews-dont-have-off-switch-4-tricks-to-turn-them-off https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/googles-ai-overviews-dont-h...
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  they dont even recommend using a different search engine? shame on them. why bother fiddling with url parameters or switching entire browsers when you can just go to one of many other search sites? this is just an ad for brave being disguised as something 'helpful'.
- notepad0x90 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - root-parent 4mo ago
    As a bot yes...it offends me terribly, at a deep sigmoidic spiritual level...
NDlurker 4mo ago
I've been going back and forth between DDG and Google. I have DDG set as default and only use Google if DDG isn't giving me good results.
- teejmya 4mo ago
  Same. If I need to Google it, I add "!g" to the search terms. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
  - NDlurker 4mo ago
    Thanks for the tip; I didn't know about that.
  - floralhangnail 4mo ago
    I use !s for my fallback. I usually don't need the !g unless I want to see CAPTCHAS.
- notepad0x90 4mo ago
  !g is the best of both worlds.
feverzsj 4mo ago
Feels like google is purposely downgrading non-AI search results
- bell-cot 4mo ago
  They were doing that long before they offered "AI" search results.
- gblargg 4mo ago
  AI is downgrading non-AI search results with AI slop pages that get ranked high.
lisplist 4mo ago
I switched to DDG about a year ago and it works fine for me. For some queries, Google still surfaces better results, but DDG is good enough that I don't really miss it. The only Google service I haven't been able to replace is YouTube - no real alternative. I still use Google Maps as well, but could probably switch to Apple maps without missing much. For hiking trails, Apple Maps has often been superior. I briefly tried OpenStreetMaps years ago, but the lack of traffic data and the fact that it gave me bad directions made it untenable.
- spencerflem 4mo ago
  This is my experience as well.
- cocoto 4mo ago
  For hiking trails, I highly recommend https://www.comaps.app/ https://www.comaps.app/. It's simply miles ahead of Google Maps and Apple Maps for hike and biking.
  - lisplist 4mo ago
    Thanks, will have to check that out! Also use Strava, so maybe I should just refer to the heatmaps
- sublimefire 4mo ago
  Very similar experience. As an example I had to user Naver and Kakao maps in Korea instead of Google and those apps gave me sort of another perspective that other apps can be better than G for sure. For youtube I have been fighting the addiction and eventually disabled all options around privacy and eventually reduced the use quite a bit as they do not render the feed of random videos and shorts anymore (just subs).
notepad0x90 4mo ago
I'll have to see Google's stats as well. I went the other way leaving DDG for google AI mode. I use ddg still if I just want it to find a site. if I want answers, I use Google. I would say it's more than visits that count, how many people are staying in the DDG or Google home page doing things? a lot more with Google I'd think. they've succeeded in trapping me in their product, instead of navigating away, and I'm happier for it. And... i still don't get what people's problem is (quality wise that is), you don't have to use AI results right, and it's pretty obvious what the AI interaction portion of the page is? I'm sure ad blocker extensions can remove it entirely as well. DDG's quality is not just lower, it requires me clicking around to get AI assisted summary. I just don't get it, is people's time not valuable? even if half the time the AI results are wrong, it offsets (for me - and it's more like 5%) the time I waste clicking on random sites, some of them ad-trodden (where a blocker isn't available), outdated,etc.. and I usually don't even go to the second page of the result where as the AI reviews more than the first page or two to give me a summary. I'm saving lots and lots of time, getting more done with it. This is tech, not religion, but it feels like people are conflating the two. it's just a tool that's used to search things.
marginalia_nu 4mo ago
Yeah, starting from a much lower baseline than DDG, I've had something like a 10x increase in queries last ~week. Seems like a lot of people are looking for alternatives. For as much as how the startup space loves to pay lip service to contrarian bets, people sure do all be running in the same direction.
- aryehof 4mo ago
  Just looked at it for the first time. My first impression - grey, gray and more grey. Please help brighten our day by adding some color to the page?
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- culi 4mo ago
  thanks for your work. Marginalia is important for the survival of the human internet https://marginalia-search.com/ https://marginalia-search.com/
- tokai 4mo ago
  Seems cool. I'll definitely try using it. Do you have a shorter url? Its going to be an uphill battle telling people to check out" marginalia no not magnolia HYPHEN yeah hyphen not underscore or dash search DOT com"
qsort 4mo ago
I truly don't get Google's move. I'm sure the model is fine, but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. If I wanted to ask an AI, why can't I ask the one from my subscription... that I'm already paying for... that's actually good... that can also search the web? I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
- mrweasel 4mo ago
  > I truly don't get Google's move. Users aren't adopting their AI at the rate shareholders expect, so they now force the adoption at the cost of search.
  - Legend2440 4mo ago
    According to Google, users are adopting it. They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries. >Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. As people have realized just how much more Search can do for them, they’re searching more than ever before — so much so that last quarter, we saw queries reach an all-time high. >Another place where we’ve been rapidly innovating is in the Gemini app. Last year at I/O, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today, we’ve surpassed 900 million, more than doubling in a year. In that same time, daily requests have grown over seven times.
    - gazebo2 4mo ago
      I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something, so of course they're seeing high usage. Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.
bko 4mo ago
> Just for a start, visits to its AI-free search page noai.duckduckgo.com between May 20 to May 25 are said to have increased by 22.7% on average week-on-week, with the figures peaking May 24 at 27.7%. > The DuckDuckGo mobile app saw installs spike in the US by 18.1% on average compared to the previous week. TechCrunch reported this growth was sustained over six days, peaking at 30.5% on May 25. An even greater number of iOS users hit download on the app though, with installs seeing an average week-on-week growth of 33% and a peak of 69.9%. Why do they report only relative numbers? These numbers alone are meaningless. This is just lazy reporting.
- bee_rider 4mo ago
  They wanted to write a story where this was a negative consequence for Google, I suspect, but the absolute numbers wouldn’t have supported that (they mention that it is inconsequential to Google a couple paragraphs in, if your browser can sustain the site for that long. Mine had trouble).
- mossTechnician 4mo ago
  noai.duckduckgo.com probably receives much less traffic than the main domain, which enjoys placement in many prominent browsers (and offers AI overviews by default, although they are far smaller and less likely to appear than on Google). It would be much more interesting to see absolute numbers... in the context of the main site.
- phillipcarter 4mo ago
  ...because the absolute numbers are incredibly low. And I say this as a fan of DDG! It's just the reality we live in; those who are negatively polarized against AI enough to make this sort of change are just very small in number.
- sunaookami 4mo ago
  Because it's an ad for DuckDuckGo and PCGamer loves anti-AI engagement bait outrage articles because they bring clicks from outraged "gamers" and this brings them ad revenue, too so you are reading an ad for an ad.
- 4mo ago
noncoml 4mo ago
DuckDuckGo have to change their brand name if they want non-technical people to take them seriously
- clownpenis_fart 4mo ago
  [dead]
- Hugsbox 4mo ago
  This has been my issue with DuckDuckGo from the start... it needs to be something a little more catchy and that rolls off the tongue. Saying "I'll DuckDuckGo it" feels so clunky. As small of a gripe as it sounds like, it really does matter.
  - yegg 4mo ago
    Duck it.
    - jraph 4mo ago
      Mind the F being dangerously close to the D on most keyboards here :-)
  - jraph 4mo ago
    No need to turn a brand into a verb for this. You look it up.
    - meatmanek 4mo ago
      I still use google as a verb even though I use Kagi.
    - Hugsbox 4mo ago
      I'm not saying that it necessarily needs to be a word that's easily turned into a verb, but it certainly doesn't need to be quite such a mouthful
    - 4mo ago
mlongval 4mo ago
New Google -> perfect example of en$hi++ification.
- hightrix 4mo ago
  Google is the OG of enshittification. When DoubleClick bought Google, I mean when Google bought DoubleClick, that is when Google started printing money in exchange for a terrible user experience.
  - bitpush 4mo ago
    Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. That's nearly 20 years back. Either you're suggesting Google Search has been bad for 20 years, or you're just being willfully ignorant.
cute_boi 4mo ago
The problem with DDG is they don't have their own infra like brave and rely so much on bing...
- jraph 4mo ago
  Yeah, there's no really good option in the search engine space.
osigurdson 4mo ago
I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar. Of course DDG / others can do the exact same thing as they already have an AI mode. Maybe you can even set up ChatGPT as a search engine - not sure. The key for this use case is speed - it has to be nearly instant.
- nemomarx 4mo ago
  If you could use something like a ddg bang for it? like !chat at the end of the search and it goes to some router?
  - wlesieutre 4mo ago
    In DDG's case, searching with !ai sends it to duck.ai
- gchamonlive 4mo ago
  Kagi does this really nicely, you just add a question mark at the end and it'll add on top of the search results an LLM summary of what's been found. It's subpar in quality but more than enough to aggregate the results by theme
  - nonethewiser 4mo ago
    Yeah you'd need to support it in the term itself. So many queries coming from the url bar. As opposed to a toggle or something. I wonder if we have info on that - what percentage is input in address bar vs google homepage/app. The problem is that's not discoverable though. The toggle on google.com would be nice but most people probably arent searching that way.
- nonethewiser 4mo ago
  >I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar. This is the exact use-case, and it makes a lot of sense. The hard part for Google is identifying when someone wants search and when someone wants an AI response. It's somewhat identifiable by the input but of course thats extremely messy to determine systematically.
bratsche 4mo ago
There have been a few times where I found Google's AI mode useful. But most of the time I just want regular search results. I'm among the people who finally moved to DuckDuckGo as my default. And for the occasional time when I want some AI mode I know how to get to Google.
supaflybanzai 4mo ago
[flagged]
ctrlkctrls 4mo ago
The world seems to be fragmenting, into those that see the value in the latest from Google, and those that resist changes like this. I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc. I love Google's AI answers and their AI Mode tab. DDG is just Bing or a search vendor proxy, so I've never understood the fascination. At least Perplexity is different to Google. DDG seeing a 28% increase is like Google saying they saw a drop of 0.0000000001% in traffic. HN crowd forget that the world isn't like us, they didn't grow up with Yahoo and Alta Vista, with Excite etc etc. Our SOP is to resist all change, anytime Apple brings out a new version it'll be the end of Apple according to HN - Apple - the biggest company in the world - what do they know about UI, "Liquid Glass sucks!" :) :) We're a community in danger of pushing out those new to the tech world, recent graduates will be made to feel unwelcome if we continue to trash everything that the biggest companies in the world do, like we always know better. I implore the community to be more positive about the future, about the technologies that will take us into that future.
- SoftTalker 4mo ago
  I like having a direct answer to my question "how much oil does my engine take" but as of today I do not trust the answer to be correct, so I still cross check several sources, ideally ones that appear to be authoritative.
  - dualvariable 4mo ago
    I asked claude to dig up the current Ford Bulletin for the engine in my truck to tell me the recommended motor oil. And it found the updated recommendations properly. I wouldn't trust google AI because I know specifically that the recommendations changed, and I don't want whatever the published specs were when the engine was first manufactured, which is out of date (and found on lots of low quality blogs). I don't even trust claude, but it gave me the URL to click on to verify and summarized it well enough that I mostly trusted that it wasn't using the cited technical bulletin and not a bunch of random AI-slop web pages.
asciimoo 4mo ago
I'm seeing the same increased activity around my search engine project (https://github.com/asciimoo/hister https://github.com/asciimoo/hister). While Google's decision is very controversial, it's good to see that people are seeking for alternatives - nice motivation boost to keep developing alternative search projects.
Imnimo 4mo ago
I direct a lot of questions to LLMs, but I want to ask a high-quality model, not the crappy one that Google uses to answer queries. If I'm typing something into Google, it's because I want a search result, not an LLM answer.
- xmprt 4mo ago
  I've actually changed that. When I type something into Google it's because I want an LLM answer - their search results have been useless for a while now. But that's only because I rarely use Google these days. I'm mostly using DDG to search (I might try Kagi at some point). Google is relegated to my phone when I want a quick answer where accuracy isn't critical without needing to scroll through a bunch of search results/open and read websites on a small screen.
  - ruszki 4mo ago
    Kagi, unfortunately, is getting worse too. I think mainly because they don’t get access. But I’m not sure. I had to fallback more and more to Google, because Kagi couldn’t find exact matches, while Google could. Like texts which I copied from a webpage (for example from Android’s source), and it can’t find it. Its search results ordering is quite good, but the accessible information for them seems to be shrinking. And quickly. I’m at the point where I don’t search for complex things anymore. I use Kagi for things which can be found with any search engines. Not because I chose it, but because I was forced. This was not the case a few years back, when I started to use it. Btw, there was one thing with which Google was superior all along: define <word>. And they fucking killed it in the past months, for a far, far worse solution. Nothing comes even close.
- deltoidmaximus 4mo ago
  If I'm typing something into a google it's usually so I can be hit with a Captcha on my home internet connection and then get search results that aren't even any better than DDG. And DDG has a LLM as well.
  - pesus 4mo ago
yieldcrv 4mo ago
0.1% to 0.128% is 28% as well
gsky 4mo ago
I moved from ddg to Google ai. I find it really awesome
ChrisArchitect 4mo ago
What is the source of these numbers? Where is the DDG statement posted? Techcrunch? Thurrot? Links to links to links to nothing
arikrahman 4mo ago
I'm not sure why people go with DuckDuckGo as their engine as it's just trading Google for Bing. After learning about their deal with Microsoft, I started using Brave Search instead.
- fckgw 4mo ago
  Because they want something they know that resembles the old Google Search which DDG provides.
- dawnerd 4mo ago
  It's also pretty ironic for people to ditch Google over ai just to move to another search engine that has AI by default unless you happen to know about the noai subdomain. But it is good that people are willing to break the habit and try alternatives. That's what Google should be scared of.
chrismarlow9 4mo ago
It's been my default search for years. Lately for quick one shot AI prompts I use duck.ai (they put some basic effort into anonymizing your chat: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/duckai/ai-chat-privacy https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/duckai/ai-chat-... ). For the search, some of the local results are wrong but I live in a very small area so it may be more reliable for highly populated areas. Lately I've been checking out Kagi for a few things just to see what the quality is like on competition. The anonymized chat (proxy) for AI is cool but very small context limit. Good for looking up random questions and they typically include references.
sltr 4mo ago
[flagged]
shevy-java 4mo ago
I am trying to find a replacement for google search. DuckDuckGo was also useless. Qwant just copy/pastes Google's awful UI. We kind of see that all search engines suck now, but in many cases there is no real reason why that should be the case. For instance, why did Qwant copy/paste Google's horrible UI? There is no logical reason for this other than trying to bait in people who like the Google search UI. I don't like that UI Google chose since like 10 years or more; Google ruined its search engine already way before AI. We really need a search engine that works and isn't control by a greedy, Evil adCompany. DDG isn't the answer; neither is Qwant.
- wetpaws 4mo ago
  [dead]
benced 4mo ago
... DDG had .7% marketshare (https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share). 28% more visits would take it to .84%. Assuming those all come from Google, that would mean .16% of Google users didn't love AI mode enough to switch. Classic example of misleading with stats.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
  DDG is probably regularly growing at ~20%+ anyway... Google's search volume has been growing 12%+ per year for 20+ years, there's obviously much more room for volatility when you're smaller...
- hansmayer 4mo ago
  Well... it is still a huge relative increase. And who knows where it could lead them, if they can sustain that sort of growth on a weekly basis...compounding and all...
  - benced 4mo ago
    The headline is implying that AI mode is super unpopular with the very large number "28" and not the more accurate number of .16.
- Tubelord 4mo ago
  I wonder what other alternative search engines Google lost to besides DDG.
30minAdayHN 4mo ago
I switched away from Google to Duck a few years back. But I observed that I mostly do !g and end up on Google. I read similar comments from many others on other threads. Recently I switched to Kagi and has been a very happy customer. I never visited Google after that. Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone.
- metalliqaz 4mo ago
  Google is better than Duck's backend (Bing or Yahoo, IIRC) However, I find that most of my queries don't require Google to find the result. Maybe once every couple days I do a search, don't like the results, and then add a "!g". Most of the time it's fine and I get to avoid Google's ecosystem.
  - specproc 4mo ago
    Yeah, same. Switched my default to Duck about a year back although I've still got Google on mobile (something I only just clocked as I type). Google search had degraded so badly pre-AI, I was already finding it equivalent for most things. The odd few searches benefit from Google, but nowhere near enough to warrant them as a default.
- siquick 4mo ago
  > Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone. I just have Kagi set a custom search engine in mobile browser - no seperate app needed. https://kagi.com/search?q=%s https://kagi.com/search?q=%s
  - ymhr 4mo ago
    Unfortunately the only way to do it on IOS Safari is as the user above described, you have to install and configure an extension, there are no 'custom' search engines natively. Other IOS browsers are fine, i.e. Chrome, Vivaldi, Orion, etc.
nyjah 4mo ago
It's the french open. There's always been a bug with google search where sometimes I have to search 'french open' or 'australian open' twice to get it to give me the google scores. That bug still exists, sometimes it just brings up the site, but now it will also sometimes just go into AI mode and it will refuse to get out of it. Like even when you click for otherwise, it will force its way back. The google live scores is a great feature. But when it's not coming up, even googling "french open google live scores" doesn't just bring it up every single time. It might if you try, but try multiple times over the day...
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
anematode 4mo ago
[flagged]
vessenes 4mo ago
Both can be true. A small number dropping off could be a big boost for DDG.
wordpad 4mo ago
> 28% more visits So, from 3 to 4 people?
d--b 4mo ago
maybe AI agents prefer duckduckgo?
SubiculumCode 4mo ago
I dislike the AI summaries always popping up. I do now see an AI mode button. But so far I am not forced into AI mode. Is this happening for other people?
- runjake 4mo ago
  Append "udm=14" to your Google searches to make this stuff go away (for now, until Google removes it). You can add a custom search engine to your browser with something like: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 Sometimes that will glitch out on Chromium browsers. If so, try this variant: {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14
  - dartharva 4mo ago
    This↑ - I had also jumped ship to DDG until I realized this query string still works on Google.
jmyeet 4mo ago
If you want to use DDG then go for it. Let people enjoy things, I say. But let's not pretend DDG is suddenly surging, or even relevant really. It's a niche service largely for virtue-signaling by people who insist that "Google sucks". That's their core demographic. Some Googling claims DDG gets 145M searches per day and claims Google gets ~14B. Well, 14B translates to ~162k QPS. I know for a fact that Google's traffic is significantly higher than that so I'm not sure where that claim comes from. I honeslty don't believe a significant percentage of Google users even know Sundar made a statement about people loving AI mode or would even care, one way or the other. This is just more marketing fluff trying to will DDG growth into existence.
ymolodtsov 4mo ago
AI Mode is pretty good. It's quite reliable and much faster than any LLM chatbot. AI Overviews are pretty bad though.
nikole9696 4mo ago
If I want AI, I'll use AI. If I want Search, I want Search. Give me the option. Then again I switched to DDG like, last year.
bagol 4mo ago
Duckduckgo is blocked in my country. Reddit is blocked in my country. My country is also one of first countries agree to ban free (non playstore) android app installation. My country is so against freedom. What a shitty country.
- cryo32 4mo ago
  Which country did this so I can avoid the hell out of it? Also sorry!
  - bagol 4mo ago
    Indonesia
    - cryo32 4mo ago
      Thank you. I’m sorry :(
  - wasting_time 4mo ago
    I don't have enough karma to vouch bagols answer, but in case you don't have showdead turned on: they live in Indonesia.
ashm1104 4mo ago
Oh thank God, I am not the only one here, I mean idk why but I am still not so comfortable with AI mode,and I just need Search, like good old search. I feel this all started when people were saying things like google search is dead or gpt will take over.. Also why is AI mode default?
pjmlp 4mo ago
Yeah, nowadays it is a tragedy to find anything useful on the first results page.
partiallypro 4mo ago
AI snippets are just terrible, I always just scroll past it. I want to find the website I'm looking for, if I wanted to use AI I'd open up an AI app or website.
josefritzishere 4mo ago
Consumers have spoken. They hate AI. Woe unto those tech companies who fail to listen. Your competitors will be happy to take your customers.
apparent 4mo ago
I wonder if the 28% more visits was mostly among existing users. I skimmed the article and it didn't look like this was broken out. It would be much more impactful/impressive if they brought in a bunch of new users, as opposed to ratcheting up usage among people who were already aware of it.
ThomPete 4mo ago
That will fall again and everyone will be back to google
juancn 4mo ago
Google has ~90% of search where DuckDuckGo has <1%. A ~30% jump of DuckDuckGo is about 0.3% of global search traffic, basically a rounding error for google. Still, it's an interesting signal, but not nearly enough to worry Google. If the jump had been 300% that would merit some thought.
- throwaway27448 4mo ago
  I don't think you can even refer to google as search anymore when it spews bullshit rather than furnishing results
  - schnitzelstoat 4mo ago
    The ‘bullshit’ is often better than the results though. I don’t have to click through a load of cookie banners and login popups to see it.
- cheeseface 4mo ago
  0.3% is definitely not a ”rounding error”. For Google it would mean roughly $650M drop in revenue.
  - crowcroft 4mo ago
    Two issues with this. - Search ad pricing is inelastic and auction based (supply goes down price goes up). - A jump in traffic to DuckDuckGo does not mean Google is experiencing a decline in search volume. Number of queries per session has increased since launching AI Overviews.
    - geocar 4mo ago
      > Search ad pricing is inelastic and auction based (supply goes down price goes up). False. Advertisers have budgets and ROI targets. If Google cannot compete people will get their clicks elsewhere. > A jump in traffic to DuckDuckGo does not mean Google is experiencing a decline in search volume. Number of queries per session has increased since launching AI Overviews. But it does produce lower ROI for advertisers (in this case: CTR goes down because my ad is being shown to more people). Once user is on my landing page, my conversion rate is fine month on month (±1%), but my CTR on google got sharply worse by 5% since, and if it goes much further I'll stop completely on Google. I doubt I am alone: Maybe others will jump ship sooner and the price will recover (demand goes down) but in either event Google is less net revenue, and given how aggressive their sales pushes have been I think it could be that big
jstummbillig 4mo ago
Why would that be problematic? People are AI outraged. Some of them will move. Those who stay like it better.
dminik 4mo ago
I'm in these stats I think. But mostly because I was trying to do an exact search ("something to search") and discovered that google just ignores it. There's a local search engine with a motto that translates to something like "Find what you don't know." Google has seemingly adapted "find what you don't want."
gdiamos 4mo ago
Instead of move to duck duck go I just stopped using search
Ferret7446 4mo ago
How much traffic does ddg get normally? For such a small player, 28% could very well be normal variance.
chasd00 4mo ago
I’d like to see the total number of visits. Also, I hope no one is reading this as a 28% reduction in Google use.
- add-sub-mul-div 4mo ago
  About a third of the comments on this site are in this genre of: imagine the typical reader is dumber than you so that you can explain things to them.
dtnewman 4mo ago
Google has 90% market share. DDG has 0.7%. I don't have a POV on whether AI mode is good or not, but surely there's gonna be some people who dislike it, and even if that's a tiny percentage, it can be a huge boost to DDG.
- Retric 4mo ago
  0.7% * 1.28 = 0.9% market share today. A large fraction of the people using Google probably have no idea DDG exists. So the backlash is likely significantly larger than just the 0.2% who left to this search engine.
  - wiether 4mo ago
    Chrome/Android users in the UE have, at least, heard about DDG.
FiatLuxDave 4mo ago
I rarely use Google for search, but I've actually gone back a few times just to use the AI search function. Occasionally it is useful, especially when I can't think of the correct term to search for. But recently I had an entertaining experience with it. I was trying to apply a math technique to an application it wasn't normally used for, and I figured that somewhere out there was a paper or two explaining how to do what I was attempting. So, I tried Googling, and the response was something like: "You appear to be working with two completely different areas of mathematics, which have absolutely no connections between them. That's fascinating! Would you like to know more about either of these two completely separated subjects which have nothing to do with each other?" Not useful, Google, but definitely good for a laugh.
- ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
  I read it because it's shown before search results now but I have to stop myself to not accidentally rely on it. Had two times it misinformed me pretty blatantly and its links to sources are wrong a lot.
siteblob 4mo ago
[flagged]
KaiMagnus 4mo ago
I've been using it a lot in recent months, even though I was very critical about this in the past. Of course, asking it to give yes/no answers or specific numbers is asking for trouble, but finally I can let something else read the SEOed garbage, point me in the right direction and let me browse the search results in a much more pleasant way than before.
puskavi 4mo ago
wheels gotta turn even if driver is heading towards ledge
worik 4mo ago
Duckduckgo.com has a AI advisor too. I know not of Google's, I really do not give a soft hoot. The DDG one is good, useful
- Tubelord 4mo ago
  Also toggle-able with a very visible and accessible widget that remembers your choice.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
Neither Google nor Kagi has an .onion address. Unlike DDG
- freediver 4mo ago
  Not sure what you use for search, but it could be better ;) http://kagi2pv5bdcxxqla5itjzje2cgdccuwept5ub6patvmvn3qgmgjd6vid.onion/ http://kagi2pv5bdcxxqla5itjzje2cgdccuwept5ub6patvmvn3qgmgjd6... (from https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/accessing-via-tor.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/accessing-via-tor...)
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
    Thank you. I confess I only looked for it in the HTTP headers, no search For example, DDG puts it in the content-security-policy header
dayeye2006 4mo ago
Feel duckduckgo can make an API for agent usage of search engine
dmkolobov 4mo ago
when I saw this headline my first thought was: wow DDG must not have a lot of users.
bborud 4mo ago
Let’s be honest: ai mode is less shit than the ads that, for some searches, all but replace all legitimate content. But it is still shit compared to a search engine. Which Google no longer is. There’s a real opening for actual search engines now.
arjie 4mo ago
Wait, Duck Duck Go has some 50 million MAUs and that went to 65 million MAUs or so. Google has 5 billion MAUs, so some 15/5000 users went to Duck Duck Go. That doesn't seem damning. 99.97% of Google users didn't go to DDG.
- foxglacier 4mo ago
  Yep but most news readers are innumerate and scientifically illiterate so they just get swept up by the narrative.
erfgh 4mo ago
For those that don't know, DDG already has an AI mode: duck.ai
da768 4mo ago
More like Google started requiring a captcha in Firefox mobile
Julien_Wealth 4mo ago
[flagged]
luckydata 4mo ago
that 28% is what, 3 people?
felooboolooomba 4mo ago
I like the AI mode, but only because Google intentionally destroyed their search engine. There wasn't any real competition back then, but now everyone has access to AI. They're frantically trying to keep their search engine customers. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
- gblargg 4mo ago
  Years back Google temporarily put their old database from the good times up for searching. You could actually find technical results reliably. It was so nice.
RigelKentaurus 4mo ago
Makes sense to me. When I use Google, I am interested in getting the information quickly and in the right length and format, and am not interested in navigating to particular page(s) and looking up that info myself. Perhaps this will impact Adwords revenue in the long run but Google will find a way out. If Google didn't have AI mode, I would've stopped using it completely.
andxor 4mo ago
The same people who told you Google was going to zero three years ago because Search would become irrelevant are now telling you users will move away from Google because it’s removing Search. When will people learn that the quality of Google’s leadership is better than that of the average Joe on Hacker News or a random tech journalist writing clickbait articles?
- foxglacier 4mo ago
  Looks like you're making the common mistake of counting all people you disagree with as the same person. In this case they're clearly different - AI proponents and AI skeptics respectively. But your 2nd paragraph is spot on.
  - andxor 4mo ago
    I'm calling out the "tech opinionist community" broadly speaking. I don't know if it's the same exact people but it's often the same forums or news outlets.
    - foxglacier 4mo ago
      Yea that sounds like different people. Even news sites can have contradictory opinions and narratives - they should otherwise they're just biased. But it doesn't make it the same people.
oofbaroomf 4mo ago
If DDG got 28% more visits, Google lost about .6% of their visits.
uejfiweun 4mo ago
I use DDG but the problem I have with it is that, well, the results just kind of suck. I have slowly used the "!g" operator more and more over the years to the point that now probably 95% of my DDG searches are just Google searches.
madrox 4mo ago
It's difficult to put my finger on it, but there is something about Google's AI UX that I deeply dislike. It has nothing to do with the quality of the response, which seems fine, but... The header and input bars are too big. The max width of the response is too narrow. The font is too large. The way it renders onto the page feels weirdly clunky. There is a whole sidebar in addition to the top bar just for two buttons. In the + button under user input, they hide everything under there like model selection even though there's a ton of real estate to the right of it. Everything feels unnecessarily cramped on the page in spite of ridiculous amounts of whitespace. Yet my ultimate dislike feels like something more than the sum of the parts. It feels like the Yahoo of AI. Anyone not relying on distribution advantages would know they need to do better. It really speaks to Google's perennial weakness: they can never seem to make an incredible UX.
- flaviolivolsi 4mo ago
  I guess that's because they hardly ever build a product that's really theirs. Google Cloud came in response to Amazon (who built AWS because they needed it themselves), Gemini came in response to ChatGPT, etc. and it always shows
epolanski 4mo ago
I use a mix of Bing (as Edge Is my daily driver) and duckduckgo, and i have to say I rarely need to use Google. I don't think that's because they are better search engines, but because their usage covers 99% of my queries and some AI like perplexity covers the remaining 1%.
ljsprague 4mo ago
I just don’t like the name.
crowcroft 4mo ago
Important context: In terms of total share of search a 28% lift for DuckDuckGo rounds down to zero. The flip side is that multiple AI Search engines have overtaken and lapped DuckDuckGo many many times over in the past year or so.
- motoxpro 4mo ago
  And its 28% on the noai.duckduckgo.com domain, not in total. So it's even smaller.
  - abirch 4mo ago
    could be the AI overlords going there to scrape more data.
starkeeper 4mo ago
Go Go DUck Maaan. Even if the backend is bing, they have somehow made it work. It's is a weird bonus for Microsoft.... If they don't try to copy google they can finally get some search market share! LOL. Hopefully this will inspire new teams to create indexed based search alternatives that are free and not enshitified, like google used to be in the early 2010s.
Hobadee 4mo ago
I love the way Kagi does AI - it defaults to a regular search, but if you add a question mark to the end, it will give you an AI answer. Additionally there is a small "quick answer" button at the top of all results that will give an AI answer if clicked.
Grimblewald 4mo ago
AI is like sex. I don't mind it, heck in the right situation I'm quite partial to it. However, if you keep trying to sneak it on me while I sleep, keep trying to slip it into agreements, keep involving people i didnt consent to being involved etc. The whole thing takes on a very ugly vibe. In fact I'm going to grow to be quite hostile toward it. Consent matters, not that I'd expect that lesson to land within silicon valley, second most rapey place in the USA after LA.
dev1ycan 4mo ago
You know what is crazy, that this whole bullshit "MDC" garbage "API" that websites and stuff like Outlook have is stuff that they could have had by having SIMPLER settings in their services, they obfuscate them like hell then they give the "solution" simple API to agents so that THEY can easily use their services, but not humans. It's so disgusting, I hate this industry.
qzgrid37 4mo ago
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deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
yakbarber 4mo ago
it's a solution looking for a problem and google are desperate to stay relevant there. We just don't need to search as much. But I _do_ still want to search sometimes, it's still a valid use case, just not as important as it used to be. But when a do search, I want simple, relevant, external search results so that I can go straight to those good sources. Google isn't satisfied with their returns on that though.
matt3210 4mo ago
Ai is free now, how cool. Now we make an agent that uses google search ai in playwright.
arun6582 4mo ago
I want alternative to YouTube where dislike button count is shown.
timsuchanek 4mo ago
I hope they use DuckDB
frr149 4mo ago
We have all overused a single solution to "finding stuff on the web": the search engine. Now it's dying, killed by AI and by Google's greed. There's no alternative left, no webrings, no web directories. If all your content is now only on your server, you're invisible.
- somat 4mo ago
  Do your part, link to a website you enjoy. In some ways the last bastion of the real web are the web comics. Small personal projects where they link to like minded other projects.
- PAndreew 4mo ago
  I already submitted my take on this to Show HN: https://currantfeed.cc/ https://currantfeed.cc/. Noone gave a shit so it's most likely a very bad idea and certainly a very steep uphill battle. It's basically an Airbnb for websites that by default randomly sorts them and then you can filter by different attributes. Owners have to submit and maintain their "listings". It does have an optional subscription (I'm not sure if it works haven't tested it).
p0w3n3d 4mo ago
To be honest I use Google AI mode a lot. And Duckduckgo for private search. I default to DDG and use !g if I want to resign from privacy or find some merchandise to buy
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 4mo ago
  You mean looking for merchandise is something you're fine being tracked and funneled into the product with the best SEO game?
  - p0w3n3d 4mo ago
    actually yes. Google has better mechanism of finding the products I am looking for. Some would say this is serene acceptance (fifth stage of grief). Also when tuning my browser too much towards the privacy, I kept getting mugged by "please show all the bicycles on the picture" for too many times, so I acknowledge I will be shoved up in my a...throat with new models of the washing machine I've just bought, and the sexy lingerie for some reason, that I'm not really sure of.
mock-possum 4mo ago
Wonder how satisfied all those new people are with ddg’s results I never had much luck with it - this mostly covers my experience: https://www.tumblr.com/ddgvsggl https://www.tumblr.com/ddgvsggl
deafpolygon 4mo ago
People don't love AI mode. It's just the only way to get good results on Google anymore.
thecopy 4mo ago
I genuinely find DDG more effective than Google Search. I have used it as a daily driver for 2+ years now. When i cannot find anything with DDG, i try with the !g macro, but results are more often than not even worse.
- TonyStr 4mo ago
  It certainly struggles a lot more with non-English queries. Been using it since 2019
mnmnmn 4mo ago
[dead]
ChuckMcM 4mo ago
The AI stuff got my wife to switch. So there's that. I've been using DDG for a while.
nikolay 4mo ago
I've been using Kagi for years and am not looking back. Okay, it costs money; it could sometimes be worse than Google, but the only free cheese is in the mousetrap.
- txdv 4mo ago
  how is duckduckgo using us?
  - shantnutiwari 4mo ago
    duck shoves AI results down my throat no matter how many times I say no. And they are getting more aggressive with their ads.
    - lgcas 4mo ago
      DDG does offer a non-ai "mode" at https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
- siquick 4mo ago
  +1 for Kagi. Been a subscriber for almost 2 years and no intention of cancelling, it just works.
narrowtux 4mo ago
I finally switched to duck duck go, not because of the AI push of google, but because of the constant nagging popups to download the google app. Just let me google things in mobile safari in peace!
jasonli0226 4mo ago
[flagged]
timbaboon 4mo ago
I’m now paying for Kagi :/
lorentzokonwo 4mo ago
Well good for them, stop forcing AI on people.
CodeWithAgents 4mo ago
28% more of 100 users is still nothing ... who actually uses DuckDuckGo? It seems at least in the german market not relevant and a clone of BING anyways.
alexfortin 4mo ago
[dead]
xinayder 4mo ago
I remember when I watched a presentation from a Google engineer at a summer school for AI tech last year and I asked why Google shipped AI slop when no one wanted it. He tried to gaslight me saying "users like this feature", and I told him to look up every major forum on the web, there is not a single good comment about Gemini being forced on. Then he said it was just an A/B testing and that not everyone had it enabled by default. I wouldn't be surprised if they made up the statistics to justify the enslopification.
p-t 4mo ago
i started using duckduckgo after google added ai, and it runs way faster [i use lite.duckduckgo.com :3] edit: my school blocks all search engines other than google though XD
deaton 4mo ago
The top of every google search result is a confidently wrong chatbot now. It feels like Google has sacrificed correctness, the thing they were great at, the thing that built their search engine into the biggest internet service in the world, in the name of AI.
liampulles 4mo ago
Google's Search and its AI result can alternatively help or hinder me, I find. If I'm looking for a relatively straightforward and simple piece of information quickly (e.g. "wooden arch mirror stores linden") then the AI summary can be useful, because I don't need more than surface level info. If I intend to analyze and understand something (e.g. "developer API issues Zoho Thrive"), then the AI summary and the general degradation in the quality of search results from Google really hinder me. I have to work to avoid a lazy and low value answer, whereas what I really want to do is go through various actual websites and reflect on them to gain insight.
- lumost 4mo ago
  I find it to be a fundamental hinderance as they use a cheap model. The cheap model gets confused based on conflicting reddit threads and then I get a wrong answer. It's better to just ask codex to do the search for me, but this is much slower - but increasingly my go to. I wish there was a fast search api codex could hook into to answer internet questions faster.
- trvz 4mo ago
  I feel like the second scenario was never good with Google. You had to go through several search results describing other problems, and there was a high chance you still didn't find anything relating to yours; and then, it wasn't guaranteed that a years-old problem got fixed. If I have an issue with my Mac, seeing an Apple Discussions result at the top readies me for disappointment. Meanwhile, I've found a normal chat with current ChatGPT to be very helpful, as long as it isn't about itself or other OpenAI products.
  - liampulles 4mo ago
    My usecase would be investigating a potential integration - I want to go and see everyone's comments on the websites themselves. I'm not looking for an answer - I don't know the question - I'm looking for understanding.
hedora 4mo ago
If you love AI mode, then won't you just use a chat app? That'll search Google for you, and it'll keep more context, use a better model, etc, etc. When people open a search bar and type stuff, they're showing an incredibly strong intent to... search the web. This reminds me of when MS tried to turn all Windows user interactions into bing, or (even worse) copilot. How did that work out for them? Anyway, unlike windows, there's zero cost to switch away from Google's search product. I'm predicting a bigger backfire.
wslh 4mo ago
[dead]
pmdr 4mo ago
Alternative search engines are popular with the tech/HN bubble. Other than Bing, they have no palpable market share. Google does not care about said bubble because it mostly overlaps people who would use an adblocker anyway and who are capable of finding their way around other for-profit restrictions (i.e. downloading videos with yt-dlp instead of paying for YT Premium). DDG has <1% market share, so +28%, while encouraging, means nothing for the monopoly. I use it. I use Brave Search as well. Paid for Kagi for a while. But getting people to use anything other than Google (or the default Bing for on Windows) is nearly impossible at scale.
4rachelp 4mo ago
in case this point hasn't been made -- what was the baseline for the 28% more visits? duckduck go has like 1-2% search share. So, if there is even a small group of opinionated users who flee google, that would make a big difference. We can't conclude as a result that everyone hates the AI push.
dyauspitr 4mo ago
People do like AI mode, though just notice the next time someone googles for something they will stop on the AI summary like 99% of the time
guluarte 4mo ago
This reminds me when people where moving away from yahoo, ask jeeves to google
mark-r 4mo ago
[dead]
heyaco 4mo ago
searXNG dumbojack

1075 points by HelloUsername 4mo ago

John7878781 4mo ago

AI mode isn't that terrible.

jeffbee 4mo ago
AI summary isn't bad at all, but people don't understand it and Google hasn't explained it very well. It is just RAG. It is a summarization of the documents that are on the first page of the SERP. People think it is answering their question independently, but that's not what it does. It takes the docs that are top ranked from web search and digests them. The corresponding "AI overview" feature of Gmail is amazing. It digests the messages that match your search. Because it is using your own docs, the output is way better. Or, at least, mine is. Maybe your inbox is full of lies but mine isn't.
- josefritzishere 4mo ago
  People understand it. They dislike it. Users want what they want. When Software companies purport to know better... they do themselves and their customers a disservice.

brikym 4mo ago

So a tiny fraction of people left Google to DDG? Seems like they both win.

256BitChris 4mo ago

From my experience the Google AI mode is more restrictive on what it will let you search for and the content it produces. I personally have had to use DuckDuckGo to search for things that Gemini finds to be against its instructions to answer. And I'm not talking about things that are NSFW, but some things that Gemini just doesn't want to discuss. That's kinda Gemini's problem in general, it just is overly restrictive and doesn't like to talk about anything things that Claude will freely talk about and push against and discuss with you.

rvnx 4mo ago
You are absolutely right, DuckDuckGo is better for porn than Google, but if you want even better results you can use Yandex. For other things, Grok is quite fast — Perplexity too

al_borland 4mo ago

My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they hate AI being pushed so hard. One was just messaging me this morning about alternatives to Google search and maps. He ended up downloading DuckDuckGo. If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.

dylan604 4mo ago
Search is not the golden goose. Ads are. If search was the golden goose, they wouldn't be trying so hard to replace it with AI. Just because Google used to do search as their main point of business does not mean that holds true today. Holding on to the false premise will only add to your confusion about their decisions.
- jeffwask 4mo ago
  They only dominate Ads because they dominate search if everyone leaves Search the ad business grinds to a halt as well. These are the ying and yang of Google.
  - dylan604 4mo ago
    Kind of. They dominate ads because the dominated search when they bought the successful ads company. By that point in time, they already had your profile built, and the further use of search just continues to enhance that profile. But now that ads has its own persistent tracking that dependence on search is not as strong as it used to be
    - jeffwask 4mo ago
      People have reported a decrease in ROI from spending on Google ads already when they no longer control all the eyes and where you rank in what those eyes see when they search, that ROI will drop even more. People will stop paying for Google ads when the ROI is higher on other platforms. Couple that with the fact that a lot of folks have moved their search to GPT or Claude once those platforms start taking in ad money... that budget will come from somewhere and that's likely existing Google ad buy dollars shifting.

mt_ 4mo ago

As someone who has been driving DDG for the past 6 years, i have switched to Google back due to the new AI mode,, its such a nice quick way to check information and validate ideas.. no friction included.

wotsdat 4mo ago

[dead]

Legend2440 4mo ago

Both statements can be true, you know. Some people can love AI mode while others hate it.

huflungdung 4mo ago
[dead]

root-parent 4mo ago

"Google’s AI Overviews Don't Have an Off Switch. 4 Tricks to Return to Traditional Web Results" - https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/googles-ai-overviews-dont-have-off-switch-4-tricks-to-turn-them-off https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/googles-ai-overviews-dont-h...

john_strinlai 4mo ago
they dont even recommend using a different search engine? shame on them. why bother fiddling with url parameters or switching entire browsers when you can just go to one of many other search sites? this is just an ad for brave being disguised as something 'helpful'.
notepad0x90 4mo ago
[flagged]
- root-parent 4mo ago
  As a bot yes...it offends me terribly, at a deep sigmoidic spiritual level...

NDlurker 4mo ago

I've been going back and forth between DDG and Google. I have DDG set as default and only use Google if DDG isn't giving me good results.

teejmya 4mo ago
Same. If I need to Google it, I add "!g" to the search terms. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
- NDlurker 4mo ago
  Thanks for the tip; I didn't know about that.
- floralhangnail 4mo ago
  I use !s for my fallback. I usually don't need the !g unless I want to see CAPTCHAS.
notepad0x90 4mo ago
!g is the best of both worlds.

feverzsj 4mo ago

Feels like google is purposely downgrading non-AI search results

bell-cot 4mo ago
They were doing that long before they offered "AI" search results.
gblargg 4mo ago
AI is downgrading non-AI search results with AI slop pages that get ranked high.

lisplist 4mo ago

I switched to DDG about a year ago and it works fine for me. For some queries, Google still surfaces better results, but DDG is good enough that I don't really miss it. The only Google service I haven't been able to replace is YouTube - no real alternative. I still use Google Maps as well, but could probably switch to Apple maps without missing much. For hiking trails, Apple Maps has often been superior. I briefly tried OpenStreetMaps years ago, but the lack of traffic data and the fact that it gave me bad directions made it untenable.

spencerflem 4mo ago
This is my experience as well.
cocoto 4mo ago
For hiking trails, I highly recommend https://www.comaps.app/ https://www.comaps.app/. It's simply miles ahead of Google Maps and Apple Maps for hike and biking.
- lisplist 4mo ago
  Thanks, will have to check that out! Also use Strava, so maybe I should just refer to the heatmaps
sublimefire 4mo ago
Very similar experience. As an example I had to user Naver and Kakao maps in Korea instead of Google and those apps gave me sort of another perspective that other apps can be better than G for sure. For youtube I have been fighting the addiction and eventually disabled all options around privacy and eventually reduced the use quite a bit as they do not render the feed of random videos and shorts anymore (just subs).

notepad0x90 4mo ago

I'll have to see Google's stats as well. I went the other way leaving DDG for google AI mode. I use ddg still if I just want it to find a site. if I want answers, I use Google. I would say it's more than visits that count, how many people are staying in the DDG or Google home page doing things? a lot more with Google I'd think. they've succeeded in trapping me in their product, instead of navigating away, and I'm happier for it. And... i still don't get what people's problem is (quality wise that is), you don't have to use AI results right, and it's pretty obvious what the AI interaction portion of the page is? I'm sure ad blocker extensions can remove it entirely as well. DDG's quality is not just lower, it requires me clicking around to get AI assisted summary. I just don't get it, is people's time not valuable? even if half the time the AI results are wrong, it offsets (for me - and it's more like 5%) the time I waste clicking on random sites, some of them ad-trodden (where a blocker isn't available), outdated,etc.. and I usually don't even go to the second page of the result where as the AI reviews more than the first page or two to give me a summary. I'm saving lots and lots of time, getting more done with it. This is tech, not religion, but it feels like people are conflating the two. it's just a tool that's used to search things.

marginalia_nu 4mo ago

Yeah, starting from a much lower baseline than DDG, I've had something like a 10x increase in queries last ~week. Seems like a lot of people are looking for alternatives. For as much as how the startup space loves to pay lip service to contrarian bets, people sure do all be running in the same direction.

aryehof 4mo ago
Just looked at it for the first time. My first impression - grey, gray and more grey. Please help brighten our day by adding some color to the page?
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
culi 4mo ago
thanks for your work. Marginalia is important for the survival of the human internet https://marginalia-search.com/ https://marginalia-search.com/
tokai 4mo ago
Seems cool. I'll definitely try using it. Do you have a shorter url? Its going to be an uphill battle telling people to check out" marginalia no not magnolia HYPHEN yeah hyphen not underscore or dash search DOT com"

qsort 4mo ago

I truly don't get Google's move. I'm sure the model is fine, but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. If I wanted to ask an AI, why can't I ask the one from my subscription... that I'm already paying for... that's actually good... that can also search the web? I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?

mrweasel 4mo ago
> I truly don't get Google's move. Users aren't adopting their AI at the rate shareholders expect, so they now force the adoption at the cost of search.
- Legend2440 4mo ago
  According to Google, users are adopting it. They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries. >Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. As people have realized just how much more Search can do for them, they’re searching more than ever before — so much so that last quarter, we saw queries reach an all-time high. >Another place where we’ve been rapidly innovating is in the Gemini app. Last year at I/O, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today, we’ve surpassed 900 million, more than doubling in a year. In that same time, daily requests have grown over seven times.
  - gazebo2 4mo ago
    I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something, so of course they're seeing high usage. Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.

bko 4mo ago

> Just for a start, visits to its AI-free search page noai.duckduckgo.com between May 20 to May 25 are said to have increased by 22.7% on average week-on-week, with the figures peaking May 24 at 27.7%. > The DuckDuckGo mobile app saw installs spike in the US by 18.1% on average compared to the previous week. TechCrunch reported this growth was sustained over six days, peaking at 30.5% on May 25. An even greater number of iOS users hit download on the app though, with installs seeing an average week-on-week growth of 33% and a peak of 69.9%. Why do they report only relative numbers? These numbers alone are meaningless. This is just lazy reporting.

bee_rider 4mo ago
They wanted to write a story where this was a negative consequence for Google, I suspect, but the absolute numbers wouldn’t have supported that (they mention that it is inconsequential to Google a couple paragraphs in, if your browser can sustain the site for that long. Mine had trouble).
mossTechnician 4mo ago
noai.duckduckgo.com probably receives much less traffic than the main domain, which enjoys placement in many prominent browsers (and offers AI overviews by default, although they are far smaller and less likely to appear than on Google). It would be much more interesting to see absolute numbers... in the context of the main site.
phillipcarter 4mo ago
...because the absolute numbers are incredibly low. And I say this as a fan of DDG! It's just the reality we live in; those who are negatively polarized against AI enough to make this sort of change are just very small in number.
sunaookami 4mo ago
Because it's an ad for DuckDuckGo and PCGamer loves anti-AI engagement bait outrage articles because they bring clicks from outraged "gamers" and this brings them ad revenue, too so you are reading an ad for an ad.
4mo ago

noncoml 4mo ago

DuckDuckGo have to change their brand name if they want non-technical people to take them seriously

clownpenis_fart 4mo ago
[dead]
Hugsbox 4mo ago
This has been my issue with DuckDuckGo from the start... it needs to be something a little more catchy and that rolls off the tongue. Saying "I'll DuckDuckGo it" feels so clunky. As small of a gripe as it sounds like, it really does matter.
- yegg 4mo ago
  Duck it.
  - jraph 4mo ago
    Mind the F being dangerously close to the D on most keyboards here :-)
- jraph 4mo ago
  No need to turn a brand into a verb for this. You look it up.
  - meatmanek 4mo ago
    I still use google as a verb even though I use Kagi.
  - Hugsbox 4mo ago
    I'm not saying that it necessarily needs to be a word that's easily turned into a verb, but it certainly doesn't need to be quite such a mouthful
  - 4mo ago

mlongval 4mo ago

New Google -> perfect example of en$hi++ification.

hightrix 4mo ago
Google is the OG of enshittification. When DoubleClick bought Google, I mean when Google bought DoubleClick, that is when Google started printing money in exchange for a terrible user experience.
- bitpush 4mo ago
  Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. That's nearly 20 years back. Either you're suggesting Google Search has been bad for 20 years, or you're just being willfully ignorant.

cute_boi 4mo ago

The problem with DDG is they don't have their own infra like brave and rely so much on bing...

jraph 4mo ago
Yeah, there's no really good option in the search engine space.

osigurdson 4mo ago

I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar. Of course DDG / others can do the exact same thing as they already have an AI mode. Maybe you can even set up ChatGPT as a search engine - not sure. The key for this use case is speed - it has to be nearly instant.

nemomarx 4mo ago
If you could use something like a ddg bang for it? like !chat at the end of the search and it goes to some router?
- wlesieutre 4mo ago
  In DDG's case, searching with !ai sends it to duck.ai
gchamonlive 4mo ago
Kagi does this really nicely, you just add a question mark at the end and it'll add on top of the search results an LLM summary of what's been found. It's subpar in quality but more than enough to aggregate the results by theme
- nonethewiser 4mo ago
  Yeah you'd need to support it in the term itself. So many queries coming from the url bar. As opposed to a toggle or something. I wonder if we have info on that - what percentage is input in address bar vs google homepage/app. The problem is that's not discoverable though. The toggle on google.com would be nice but most people probably arent searching that way.
nonethewiser 4mo ago
>I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar. This is the exact use-case, and it makes a lot of sense. The hard part for Google is identifying when someone wants search and when someone wants an AI response. It's somewhat identifiable by the input but of course thats extremely messy to determine systematically.

bratsche 4mo ago

There have been a few times where I found Google's AI mode useful. But most of the time I just want regular search results. I'm among the people who finally moved to DuckDuckGo as my default. And for the occasional time when I want some AI mode I know how to get to Google.

supaflybanzai 4mo ago

[flagged]

ctrlkctrls 4mo ago

The world seems to be fragmenting, into those that see the value in the latest from Google, and those that resist changes like this. I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc. I love Google's AI answers and their AI Mode tab. DDG is just Bing or a search vendor proxy, so I've never understood the fascination. At least Perplexity is different to Google. DDG seeing a 28% increase is like Google saying they saw a drop of 0.0000000001% in traffic. HN crowd forget that the world isn't like us, they didn't grow up with Yahoo and Alta Vista, with Excite etc etc. Our SOP is to resist all change, anytime Apple brings out a new version it'll be the end of Apple according to HN - Apple - the biggest company in the world - what do they know about UI, "Liquid Glass sucks!" :) :) We're a community in danger of pushing out those new to the tech world, recent graduates will be made to feel unwelcome if we continue to trash everything that the biggest companies in the world do, like we always know better. I implore the community to be more positive about the future, about the technologies that will take us into that future.

SoftTalker 4mo ago
I like having a direct answer to my question "how much oil does my engine take" but as of today I do not trust the answer to be correct, so I still cross check several sources, ideally ones that appear to be authoritative.
- dualvariable 4mo ago
  I asked claude to dig up the current Ford Bulletin for the engine in my truck to tell me the recommended motor oil. And it found the updated recommendations properly. I wouldn't trust google AI because I know specifically that the recommendations changed, and I don't want whatever the published specs were when the engine was first manufactured, which is out of date (and found on lots of low quality blogs). I don't even trust claude, but it gave me the URL to click on to verify and summarized it well enough that I mostly trusted that it wasn't using the cited technical bulletin and not a bunch of random AI-slop web pages.

asciimoo 4mo ago

I'm seeing the same increased activity around my search engine project (https://github.com/asciimoo/hister https://github.com/asciimoo/hister). While Google's decision is very controversial, it's good to see that people are seeking for alternatives - nice motivation boost to keep developing alternative search projects.

Imnimo 4mo ago

I direct a lot of questions to LLMs, but I want to ask a high-quality model, not the crappy one that Google uses to answer queries. If I'm typing something into Google, it's because I want a search result, not an LLM answer.

xmprt 4mo ago
I've actually changed that. When I type something into Google it's because I want an LLM answer - their search results have been useless for a while now. But that's only because I rarely use Google these days. I'm mostly using DDG to search (I might try Kagi at some point). Google is relegated to my phone when I want a quick answer where accuracy isn't critical without needing to scroll through a bunch of search results/open and read websites on a small screen.
- ruszki 4mo ago
  Kagi, unfortunately, is getting worse too. I think mainly because they don’t get access. But I’m not sure. I had to fallback more and more to Google, because Kagi couldn’t find exact matches, while Google could. Like texts which I copied from a webpage (for example from Android’s source), and it can’t find it. Its search results ordering is quite good, but the accessible information for them seems to be shrinking. And quickly. I’m at the point where I don’t search for complex things anymore. I use Kagi for things which can be found with any search engines. Not because I chose it, but because I was forced. This was not the case a few years back, when I started to use it. Btw, there was one thing with which Google was superior all along: define <word>. And they fucking killed it in the past months, for a far, far worse solution. Nothing comes even close.
deltoidmaximus 4mo ago
If I'm typing something into a google it's usually so I can be hit with a Captcha on my home internet connection and then get search results that aren't even any better than DDG. And DDG has a LLM as well.
- pesus 4mo ago

yieldcrv 4mo ago

0.1% to 0.128% is 28% as well

gsky 4mo ago

I moved from ddg to Google ai. I find it really awesome

ChrisArchitect 4mo ago

What is the source of these numbers? Where is the DDG statement posted? Techcrunch? Thurrot? Links to links to links to nothing

arikrahman 4mo ago

I'm not sure why people go with DuckDuckGo as their engine as it's just trading Google for Bing. After learning about their deal with Microsoft, I started using Brave Search instead.

fckgw 4mo ago
Because they want something they know that resembles the old Google Search which DDG provides.
dawnerd 4mo ago
It's also pretty ironic for people to ditch Google over ai just to move to another search engine that has AI by default unless you happen to know about the noai subdomain. But it is good that people are willing to break the habit and try alternatives. That's what Google should be scared of.

chrismarlow9 4mo ago

It's been my default search for years. Lately for quick one shot AI prompts I use duck.ai (they put some basic effort into anonymizing your chat: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/duckai/ai-chat-privacy https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/duckai/ai-chat-... ). For the search, some of the local results are wrong but I live in a very small area so it may be more reliable for highly populated areas. Lately I've been checking out Kagi for a few things just to see what the quality is like on competition. The anonymized chat (proxy) for AI is cool but very small context limit. Good for looking up random questions and they typically include references.

sltr 4mo ago

[flagged]

shevy-java 4mo ago

I am trying to find a replacement for google search. DuckDuckGo was also useless. Qwant just copy/pastes Google's awful UI. We kind of see that all search engines suck now, but in many cases there is no real reason why that should be the case. For instance, why did Qwant copy/paste Google's horrible UI? There is no logical reason for this other than trying to bait in people who like the Google search UI. I don't like that UI Google chose since like 10 years or more; Google ruined its search engine already way before AI. We really need a search engine that works and isn't control by a greedy, Evil adCompany. DDG isn't the answer; neither is Qwant.

wetpaws 4mo ago
[dead]

benced 4mo ago

... DDG had .7% marketshare (https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share). 28% more visits would take it to .84%. Assuming those all come from Google, that would mean .16% of Google users didn't love AI mode enough to switch. Classic example of misleading with stats.

onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
DDG is probably regularly growing at ~20%+ anyway... Google's search volume has been growing 12%+ per year for 20+ years, there's obviously much more room for volatility when you're smaller...
hansmayer 4mo ago
Well... it is still a huge relative increase. And who knows where it could lead them, if they can sustain that sort of growth on a weekly basis...compounding and all...
- benced 4mo ago
  The headline is implying that AI mode is super unpopular with the very large number "28" and not the more accurate number of .16.
Tubelord 4mo ago
I wonder what other alternative search engines Google lost to besides DDG.

30minAdayHN 4mo ago

I switched away from Google to Duck a few years back. But I observed that I mostly do !g and end up on Google. I read similar comments from many others on other threads. Recently I switched to Kagi and has been a very happy customer. I never visited Google after that. Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone.

metalliqaz 4mo ago
Google is better than Duck's backend (Bing or Yahoo, IIRC) However, I find that most of my queries don't require Google to find the result. Maybe once every couple days I do a search, don't like the results, and then add a "!g". Most of the time it's fine and I get to avoid Google's ecosystem.
- specproc 4mo ago
  Yeah, same. Switched my default to Duck about a year back although I've still got Google on mobile (something I only just clocked as I type). Google search had degraded so badly pre-AI, I was already finding it equivalent for most things. The odd few searches benefit from Google, but nowhere near enough to warrant them as a default.
siquick 4mo ago
> Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone. I just have Kagi set a custom search engine in mobile browser - no seperate app needed. https://kagi.com/search?q=%s https://kagi.com/search?q=%s
- ymhr 4mo ago
  Unfortunately the only way to do it on IOS Safari is as the user above described, you have to install and configure an extension, there are no 'custom' search engines natively. Other IOS browsers are fine, i.e. Chrome, Vivaldi, Orion, etc.

nyjah 4mo ago

It's the french open. There's always been a bug with google search where sometimes I have to search 'french open' or 'australian open' twice to get it to give me the google scores. That bug still exists, sometimes it just brings up the site, but now it will also sometimes just go into AI mode and it will refuse to get out of it. Like even when you click for otherwise, it will force its way back. The google live scores is a great feature. But when it's not coming up, even googling "french open google live scores" doesn't just bring it up every single time. It might if you try, but try multiple times over the day...

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

anematode 4mo ago

[flagged]

vessenes 4mo ago

Both can be true. A small number dropping off could be a big boost for DDG.

wordpad 4mo ago

> 28% more visits So, from 3 to 4 people?

d--b 4mo ago

maybe AI agents prefer duckduckgo?

SubiculumCode 4mo ago

I dislike the AI summaries always popping up. I do now see an AI mode button. But so far I am not forced into AI mode. Is this happening for other people?

runjake 4mo ago
Append "udm=14" to your Google searches to make this stuff go away (for now, until Google removes it). You can add a custom search engine to your browser with something like: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 Sometimes that will glitch out on Chromium browsers. If so, try this variant: {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14
- dartharva 4mo ago
  This↑ - I had also jumped ship to DDG until I realized this query string still works on Google.

jmyeet 4mo ago

If you want to use DDG then go for it. Let people enjoy things, I say. But let's not pretend DDG is suddenly surging, or even relevant really. It's a niche service largely for virtue-signaling by people who insist that "Google sucks". That's their core demographic. Some Googling claims DDG gets 145M searches per day and claims Google gets ~14B. Well, 14B translates to ~162k QPS. I know for a fact that Google's traffic is significantly higher than that so I'm not sure where that claim comes from. I honeslty don't believe a significant percentage of Google users even know Sundar made a statement about people loving AI mode or would even care, one way or the other. This is just more marketing fluff trying to will DDG growth into existence.

ymolodtsov 4mo ago

AI Mode is pretty good. It's quite reliable and much faster than any LLM chatbot. AI Overviews are pretty bad though.

nikole9696 4mo ago

If I want AI, I'll use AI. If I want Search, I want Search. Give me the option. Then again I switched to DDG like, last year.

bagol 4mo ago

Duckduckgo is blocked in my country. Reddit is blocked in my country. My country is also one of first countries agree to ban free (non playstore) android app installation. My country is so against freedom. What a shitty country.

cryo32 4mo ago
Which country did this so I can avoid the hell out of it? Also sorry!
- bagol 4mo ago
  Indonesia
  - cryo32 4mo ago
    Thank you. I’m sorry :(
- wasting_time 4mo ago
  I don't have enough karma to vouch bagols answer, but in case you don't have showdead turned on: they live in Indonesia.

ashm1104 4mo ago

Oh thank God, I am not the only one here, I mean idk why but I am still not so comfortable with AI mode,and I just need Search, like good old search. I feel this all started when people were saying things like google search is dead or gpt will take over.. Also why is AI mode default?

pjmlp 4mo ago

Yeah, nowadays it is a tragedy to find anything useful on the first results page.

partiallypro 4mo ago

AI snippets are just terrible, I always just scroll past it. I want to find the website I'm looking for, if I wanted to use AI I'd open up an AI app or website.

josefritzishere 4mo ago

Consumers have spoken. They hate AI. Woe unto those tech companies who fail to listen. Your competitors will be happy to take your customers.

apparent 4mo ago

I wonder if the 28% more visits was mostly among existing users. I skimmed the article and it didn't look like this was broken out. It would be much more impactful/impressive if they brought in a bunch of new users, as opposed to ratcheting up usage among people who were already aware of it.

ThomPete 4mo ago

That will fall again and everyone will be back to google

juancn 4mo ago

Google has ~90% of search where DuckDuckGo has <1%. A ~30% jump of DuckDuckGo is about 0.3% of global search traffic, basically a rounding error for google. Still, it's an interesting signal, but not nearly enough to worry Google. If the jump had been 300% that would merit some thought.

throwaway27448 4mo ago
I don't think you can even refer to google as search anymore when it spews bullshit rather than furnishing results
- schnitzelstoat 4mo ago
  The ‘bullshit’ is often better than the results though. I don’t have to click through a load of cookie banners and login popups to see it.
cheeseface 4mo ago
0.3% is definitely not a ”rounding error”. For Google it would mean roughly $650M drop in revenue.
- crowcroft 4mo ago
  Two issues with this. - Search ad pricing is inelastic and auction based (supply goes down price goes up). - A jump in traffic to DuckDuckGo does not mean Google is experiencing a decline in search volume. Number of queries per session has increased since launching AI Overviews.
  - geocar 4mo ago
    > Search ad pricing is inelastic and auction based (supply goes down price goes up). False. Advertisers have budgets and ROI targets. If Google cannot compete people will get their clicks elsewhere. > A jump in traffic to DuckDuckGo does not mean Google is experiencing a decline in search volume. Number of queries per session has increased since launching AI Overviews. But it does produce lower ROI for advertisers (in this case: CTR goes down because my ad is being shown to more people). Once user is on my landing page, my conversion rate is fine month on month (±1%), but my CTR on google got sharply worse by 5% since, and if it goes much further I'll stop completely on Google. I doubt I am alone: Maybe others will jump ship sooner and the price will recover (demand goes down) but in either event Google is less net revenue, and given how aggressive their sales pushes have been I think it could be that big

jstummbillig 4mo ago

Why would that be problematic? People are AI outraged. Some of them will move. Those who stay like it better.

dminik 4mo ago

I'm in these stats I think. But mostly because I was trying to do an exact search ("something to search") and discovered that google just ignores it. There's a local search engine with a motto that translates to something like "Find what you don't know." Google has seemingly adapted "find what you don't want."

gdiamos 4mo ago

Instead of move to duck duck go I just stopped using search

Ferret7446 4mo ago

How much traffic does ddg get normally? For such a small player, 28% could very well be normal variance.

chasd00 4mo ago

I’d like to see the total number of visits. Also, I hope no one is reading this as a 28% reduction in Google use.

add-sub-mul-div 4mo ago
About a third of the comments on this site are in this genre of: imagine the typical reader is dumber than you so that you can explain things to them.

dtnewman 4mo ago

Google has 90% market share. DDG has 0.7%. I don't have a POV on whether AI mode is good or not, but surely there's gonna be some people who dislike it, and even if that's a tiny percentage, it can be a huge boost to DDG.

Retric 4mo ago
0.7% * 1.28 = 0.9% market share today. A large fraction of the people using Google probably have no idea DDG exists. So the backlash is likely significantly larger than just the 0.2% who left to this search engine.
- wiether 4mo ago
  Chrome/Android users in the UE have, at least, heard about DDG.

FiatLuxDave 4mo ago

I rarely use Google for search, but I've actually gone back a few times just to use the AI search function. Occasionally it is useful, especially when I can't think of the correct term to search for. But recently I had an entertaining experience with it. I was trying to apply a math technique to an application it wasn't normally used for, and I figured that somewhere out there was a paper or two explaining how to do what I was attempting. So, I tried Googling, and the response was something like: "You appear to be working with two completely different areas of mathematics, which have absolutely no connections between them. That's fascinating! Would you like to know more about either of these two completely separated subjects which have nothing to do with each other?" Not useful, Google, but definitely good for a laugh.

ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
I read it because it's shown before search results now but I have to stop myself to not accidentally rely on it. Had two times it misinformed me pretty blatantly and its links to sources are wrong a lot.

siteblob 4mo ago

[flagged]

KaiMagnus 4mo ago

I've been using it a lot in recent months, even though I was very critical about this in the past. Of course, asking it to give yes/no answers or specific numbers is asking for trouble, but finally I can let something else read the SEOed garbage, point me in the right direction and let me browse the search results in a much more pleasant way than before.

puskavi 4mo ago

wheels gotta turn even if driver is heading towards ledge

worik 4mo ago

Duckduckgo.com has a AI advisor too. I know not of Google's, I really do not give a soft hoot. The DDG one is good, useful

Tubelord 4mo ago
Also toggle-able with a very visible and accessible widget that remembers your choice.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago

Neither Google nor Kagi has an .onion address. Unlike DDG

freediver 4mo ago
Not sure what you use for search, but it could be better ;) http://kagi2pv5bdcxxqla5itjzje2cgdccuwept5ub6patvmvn3qgmgjd6vid.onion/ http://kagi2pv5bdcxxqla5itjzje2cgdccuwept5ub6patvmvn3qgmgjd6... (from https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/accessing-via-tor.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/accessing-via-tor...)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
  Thank you. I confess I only looked for it in the HTTP headers, no search For example, DDG puts it in the content-security-policy header

dayeye2006 4mo ago

Feel duckduckgo can make an API for agent usage of search engine

dmkolobov 4mo ago

when I saw this headline my first thought was: wow DDG must not have a lot of users.

bborud 4mo ago

Let’s be honest: ai mode is less shit than the ads that, for some searches, all but replace all legitimate content. But it is still shit compared to a search engine. Which Google no longer is. There’s a real opening for actual search engines now.

arjie 4mo ago

Wait, Duck Duck Go has some 50 million MAUs and that went to 65 million MAUs or so. Google has 5 billion MAUs, so some 15/5000 users went to Duck Duck Go. That doesn't seem damning. 99.97% of Google users didn't go to DDG.

foxglacier 4mo ago
Yep but most news readers are innumerate and scientifically illiterate so they just get swept up by the narrative.

erfgh 4mo ago

For those that don't know, DDG already has an AI mode: duck.ai

da768 4mo ago

More like Google started requiring a captcha in Firefox mobile

Julien_Wealth 4mo ago

[flagged]

luckydata 4mo ago

that 28% is what, 3 people?

felooboolooomba 4mo ago

I like the AI mode, but only because Google intentionally destroyed their search engine. There wasn't any real competition back then, but now everyone has access to AI. They're frantically trying to keep their search engine customers. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

gblargg 4mo ago
Years back Google temporarily put their old database from the good times up for searching. You could actually find technical results reliably. It was so nice.

RigelKentaurus 4mo ago

Makes sense to me. When I use Google, I am interested in getting the information quickly and in the right length and format, and am not interested in navigating to particular page(s) and looking up that info myself. Perhaps this will impact Adwords revenue in the long run but Google will find a way out. If Google didn't have AI mode, I would've stopped using it completely.

andxor 4mo ago

The same people who told you Google was going to zero three years ago because Search would become irrelevant are now telling you users will move away from Google because it’s removing Search. When will people learn that the quality of Google’s leadership is better than that of the average Joe on Hacker News or a random tech journalist writing clickbait articles?

foxglacier 4mo ago
Looks like you're making the common mistake of counting all people you disagree with as the same person. In this case they're clearly different - AI proponents and AI skeptics respectively. But your 2nd paragraph is spot on.
- andxor 4mo ago
  I'm calling out the "tech opinionist community" broadly speaking. I don't know if it's the same exact people but it's often the same forums or news outlets.
  - foxglacier 4mo ago
    Yea that sounds like different people. Even news sites can have contradictory opinions and narratives - they should otherwise they're just biased. But it doesn't make it the same people.

oofbaroomf 4mo ago

If DDG got 28% more visits, Google lost about .6% of their visits.

uejfiweun 4mo ago

I use DDG but the problem I have with it is that, well, the results just kind of suck. I have slowly used the "!g" operator more and more over the years to the point that now probably 95% of my DDG searches are just Google searches.

madrox 4mo ago

It's difficult to put my finger on it, but there is something about Google's AI UX that I deeply dislike. It has nothing to do with the quality of the response, which seems fine, but... The header and input bars are too big. The max width of the response is too narrow. The font is too large. The way it renders onto the page feels weirdly clunky. There is a whole sidebar in addition to the top bar just for two buttons. In the + button under user input, they hide everything under there like model selection even though there's a ton of real estate to the right of it. Everything feels unnecessarily cramped on the page in spite of ridiculous amounts of whitespace. Yet my ultimate dislike feels like something more than the sum of the parts. It feels like the Yahoo of AI. Anyone not relying on distribution advantages would know they need to do better. It really speaks to Google's perennial weakness: they can never seem to make an incredible UX.

flaviolivolsi 4mo ago
I guess that's because they hardly ever build a product that's really theirs. Google Cloud came in response to Amazon (who built AWS because they needed it themselves), Gemini came in response to ChatGPT, etc. and it always shows

epolanski 4mo ago

I use a mix of Bing (as Edge Is my daily driver) and duckduckgo, and i have to say I rarely need to use Google. I don't think that's because they are better search engines, but because their usage covers 99% of my queries and some AI like perplexity covers the remaining 1%.

ljsprague 4mo ago

I just don’t like the name.

crowcroft 4mo ago

Important context: In terms of total share of search a 28% lift for DuckDuckGo rounds down to zero. The flip side is that multiple AI Search engines have overtaken and lapped DuckDuckGo many many times over in the past year or so.

motoxpro 4mo ago
And its 28% on the noai.duckduckgo.com domain, not in total. So it's even smaller.
- abirch 4mo ago
  could be the AI overlords going there to scrape more data.

starkeeper 4mo ago

Go Go DUck Maaan. Even if the backend is bing, they have somehow made it work. It's is a weird bonus for Microsoft.... If they don't try to copy google they can finally get some search market share! LOL. Hopefully this will inspire new teams to create indexed based search alternatives that are free and not enshitified, like google used to be in the early 2010s.

Hobadee 4mo ago

I love the way Kagi does AI - it defaults to a regular search, but if you add a question mark to the end, it will give you an AI answer. Additionally there is a small "quick answer" button at the top of all results that will give an AI answer if clicked.

Grimblewald 4mo ago

AI is like sex. I don't mind it, heck in the right situation I'm quite partial to it. However, if you keep trying to sneak it on me while I sleep, keep trying to slip it into agreements, keep involving people i didnt consent to being involved etc. The whole thing takes on a very ugly vibe. In fact I'm going to grow to be quite hostile toward it. Consent matters, not that I'd expect that lesson to land within silicon valley, second most rapey place in the USA after LA.

dev1ycan 4mo ago

You know what is crazy, that this whole bullshit "MDC" garbage "API" that websites and stuff like Outlook have is stuff that they could have had by having SIMPLER settings in their services, they obfuscate them like hell then they give the "solution" simple API to agents so that THEY can easily use their services, but not humans. It's so disgusting, I hate this industry.

qzgrid37 4mo ago

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deleted 4mo ago

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yakbarber 4mo ago

it's a solution looking for a problem and google are desperate to stay relevant there. We just don't need to search as much. But I _do_ still want to search sometimes, it's still a valid use case, just not as important as it used to be. But when a do search, I want simple, relevant, external search results so that I can go straight to those good sources. Google isn't satisfied with their returns on that though.

matt3210 4mo ago

Ai is free now, how cool. Now we make an agent that uses google search ai in playwright.

arun6582 4mo ago

I want alternative to YouTube where dislike button count is shown.

timsuchanek 4mo ago

I hope they use DuckDB

frr149 4mo ago

We have all overused a single solution to "finding stuff on the web": the search engine. Now it's dying, killed by AI and by Google's greed. There's no alternative left, no webrings, no web directories. If all your content is now only on your server, you're invisible.

somat 4mo ago
Do your part, link to a website you enjoy. In some ways the last bastion of the real web are the web comics. Small personal projects where they link to like minded other projects.
PAndreew 4mo ago
I already submitted my take on this to Show HN: https://currantfeed.cc/ https://currantfeed.cc/. Noone gave a shit so it's most likely a very bad idea and certainly a very steep uphill battle. It's basically an Airbnb for websites that by default randomly sorts them and then you can filter by different attributes. Owners have to submit and maintain their "listings". It does have an optional subscription (I'm not sure if it works haven't tested it).

p0w3n3d 4mo ago

To be honest I use Google AI mode a lot. And Duckduckgo for private search. I default to DDG and use !g if I want to resign from privacy or find some merchandise to buy

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 4mo ago
You mean looking for merchandise is something you're fine being tracked and funneled into the product with the best SEO game?
- p0w3n3d 4mo ago
  actually yes. Google has better mechanism of finding the products I am looking for. Some would say this is serene acceptance (fifth stage of grief). Also when tuning my browser too much towards the privacy, I kept getting mugged by "please show all the bicycles on the picture" for too many times, so I acknowledge I will be shoved up in my a...throat with new models of the washing machine I've just bought, and the sexy lingerie for some reason, that I'm not really sure of.

mock-possum 4mo ago

Wonder how satisfied all those new people are with ddg’s results I never had much luck with it - this mostly covers my experience: https://www.tumblr.com/ddgvsggl https://www.tumblr.com/ddgvsggl

deafpolygon 4mo ago

People don't love AI mode. It's just the only way to get good results on Google anymore.

thecopy 4mo ago

I genuinely find DDG more effective than Google Search. I have used it as a daily driver for 2+ years now. When i cannot find anything with DDG, i try with the !g macro, but results are more often than not even worse.

TonyStr 4mo ago
It certainly struggles a lot more with non-English queries. Been using it since 2019

mnmnmn 4mo ago

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ChuckMcM 4mo ago

The AI stuff got my wife to switch. So there's that. I've been using DDG for a while.

nikolay 4mo ago

I've been using Kagi for years and am not looking back. Okay, it costs money; it could sometimes be worse than Google, but the only free cheese is in the mousetrap.

txdv 4mo ago
how is duckduckgo using us?
- shantnutiwari 4mo ago
  duck shoves AI results down my throat no matter how many times I say no. And they are getting more aggressive with their ads.
  - lgcas 4mo ago
    DDG does offer a non-ai "mode" at https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
siquick 4mo ago
+1 for Kagi. Been a subscriber for almost 2 years and no intention of cancelling, it just works.

narrowtux 4mo ago

I finally switched to duck duck go, not because of the AI push of google, but because of the constant nagging popups to download the google app. Just let me google things in mobile safari in peace!

jasonli0226 4mo ago

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timbaboon 4mo ago

I’m now paying for Kagi :/

lorentzokonwo 4mo ago

Well good for them, stop forcing AI on people.

CodeWithAgents 4mo ago

28% more of 100 users is still nothing ... who actually uses DuckDuckGo? It seems at least in the german market not relevant and a clone of BING anyways.

alexfortin 4mo ago

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xinayder 4mo ago

I remember when I watched a presentation from a Google engineer at a summer school for AI tech last year and I asked why Google shipped AI slop when no one wanted it. He tried to gaslight me saying "users like this feature", and I told him to look up every major forum on the web, there is not a single good comment about Gemini being forced on. Then he said it was just an A/B testing and that not everyone had it enabled by default. I wouldn't be surprised if they made up the statistics to justify the enslopification.

p-t 4mo ago

i started using duckduckgo after google added ai, and it runs way faster [i use lite.duckduckgo.com :3] edit: my school blocks all search engines other than google though XD

deaton 4mo ago

The top of every google search result is a confidently wrong chatbot now. It feels like Google has sacrificed correctness, the thing they were great at, the thing that built their search engine into the biggest internet service in the world, in the name of AI.

liampulles 4mo ago

Google's Search and its AI result can alternatively help or hinder me, I find. If I'm looking for a relatively straightforward and simple piece of information quickly (e.g. "wooden arch mirror stores linden") then the AI summary can be useful, because I don't need more than surface level info. If I intend to analyze and understand something (e.g. "developer API issues Zoho Thrive"), then the AI summary and the general degradation in the quality of search results from Google really hinder me. I have to work to avoid a lazy and low value answer, whereas what I really want to do is go through various actual websites and reflect on them to gain insight.

lumost 4mo ago
I find it to be a fundamental hinderance as they use a cheap model. The cheap model gets confused based on conflicting reddit threads and then I get a wrong answer. It's better to just ask codex to do the search for me, but this is much slower - but increasingly my go to. I wish there was a fast search api codex could hook into to answer internet questions faster.
trvz 4mo ago
I feel like the second scenario was never good with Google. You had to go through several search results describing other problems, and there was a high chance you still didn't find anything relating to yours; and then, it wasn't guaranteed that a years-old problem got fixed. If I have an issue with my Mac, seeing an Apple Discussions result at the top readies me for disappointment. Meanwhile, I've found a normal chat with current ChatGPT to be very helpful, as long as it isn't about itself or other OpenAI products.
- liampulles 4mo ago
  My usecase would be investigating a potential integration - I want to go and see everyone's comments on the websites themselves. I'm not looking for an answer - I don't know the question - I'm looking for understanding.

hedora 4mo ago

If you love AI mode, then won't you just use a chat app? That'll search Google for you, and it'll keep more context, use a better model, etc, etc. When people open a search bar and type stuff, they're showing an incredibly strong intent to... search the web. This reminds me of when MS tried to turn all Windows user interactions into bing, or (even worse) copilot. How did that work out for them? Anyway, unlike windows, there's zero cost to switch away from Google's search product. I'm predicting a bigger backfire.

wslh 4mo ago

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pmdr 4mo ago

Alternative search engines are popular with the tech/HN bubble. Other than Bing, they have no palpable market share. Google does not care about said bubble because it mostly overlaps people who would use an adblocker anyway and who are capable of finding their way around other for-profit restrictions (i.e. downloading videos with yt-dlp instead of paying for YT Premium). DDG has <1% market share, so +28%, while encouraging, means nothing for the monopoly. I use it. I use Brave Search as well. Paid for Kagi for a while. But getting people to use anything other than Google (or the default Bing for on Windows) is nearly impossible at scale.

4rachelp 4mo ago

in case this point hasn't been made -- what was the baseline for the 28% more visits? duckduck go has like 1-2% search share. So, if there is even a small group of opinionated users who flee google, that would make a big difference. We can't conclude as a result that everyone hates the AI push.

dyauspitr 4mo ago

People do like AI mode, though just notice the next time someone googles for something they will stop on the AI summary like 99% of the time

guluarte 4mo ago

This reminds me when people where moving away from yahoo, ask jeeves to google

mark-r 4mo ago

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heyaco 4mo ago

searXNG dumbojack