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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 pushe

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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.
    - ethmarks 5mo ago
      > when they bought the successful ads company Could you elaborate on this? What ad company did Google buy?
      - TheGrassyKnoll 5mo ago
        DoubleClick (2008, according to Wikipedia)
      - svth 5mo ago
        doubleclick.net, about 20 years ago.
- al_borland 5mo ago
  Ads in Search make up a significant percentage of their revenue. It is also the gateway that gets people into the Google ecosystem. Ads make the money, but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there. It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore. I’m always surprised by how much people are still searching for stuff as we’ve moved from the open web to various platforms (Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, etc), but every time I see Google’s revenue breakdown I’m shocked by just how important Search still is to their business. This is from 2024, but shows Search accounting for nearly 57% of revenue. Yes, this is made possible by the AdWords business, but without Search, that 57% goes away, unless that traffic goes to a 3rd party that is also using AdWords and Google were to make the same from 3rd party ads as 1st party. I find that doubtful. https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/google-revenue-breakdown https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/google-revenue-break...
  - 48terry 5mo ago
    > It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore. Which is kind of the scary hazard for Google. They made people notice search by their announcements. They drew attention to the thing people took for granted as just how things work. People suddenly have a reason to look critically at it. Google has to hope to god the attention they receive back is actually positive.
  - godelski 5mo ago
    > but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there. And let's not forget, these are the same people that when searching for "eBay" will put an ad at the top of the results, linking to eBay, and then place eBay as the top search result. I've found it hilarious that every single search engine does the same thing. You can do it even in Apple's App Store too. (Not seeing the scam I'm talking about? Search a few more times, it'll hit) How does anyone see this as anything but a scam? User clicks the ad? Get paid. User clicks the search result? No pay. Either way, the user gets the same experience. But why the fuck should any company pay for an ad when the user explicitly searched for their product? It's metric hacking. I mean what's their next move? Down rank the explicit result? When making more money requires degrading the product you know we've fucked up
- autoexec 5mo ago
  The main reason Google loved search was because it was the primary way they got your personal info. Now Chrome gives Googles your entire browsing history, Gmail lets them read your email, youtube tells them what you're interested in, android gives google your entire life offline and suddenly the only thing google search is good for is as just one more website pushing google ads. AI is going to be great at pushing ads. Plus AI trains you to give google even more control. Instead of just presenting you with a list of websites offering different perspectives and opinions on something, Google can just tell you what they want you to know/think (or not tell you anything they'd rather you not know/think about). The more you get used to treating google like an oracle instead of a librarian the easier it will be to manipulate you.
- nonethewiser 5mo ago
  This is just wrong. They are working AI into search so that AI does not cannablize search. Search goes hand-in-hand with ads.
- tayo42 5mo ago
  There's a no ads in the Ai result though. And even if they add there isn't space for like 4 or 5 ad results like some searches can return. Some Google searches I have to scroll a whole screen away before I see a real result.
- bradley13 5mo ago
  This. Google wants to sell advertising. If they can embed advertising into AI and make more money, they will. You ask AI for a product recommendation. It says "Buy X from Acme". Is that paid product placement? Who knows?
- RegW 5mo ago
  May be search is not the golden goose, perhaps more the carrot that brings the user into range of the shitty stick of ads and data leeching. I'm a bit afraid that although AI is being presented as part of the carrot, it may actually be a shittier stick.
patates 5mo 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. My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they have fear of missing out on AI :(
- thewebguyd 5mo ago
  > because they have fear of missing out on AI That's been my experience too, both with friends and coworkers. It would seem that the negative sentiment around AI is largely an internet phenomenon. I've yet to run into a hardcore "AI skeptic" irl. People seem either neutral, or enthusiastic about it.
  - pesus 5mo ago
    Meanwhile I've never run into anyone who actually likes AI in any form (except for my boss). Most people who dislike it aren't bringing it up at random. I'm sure it has to do with the circles you interact with and their demographics.
  - andersonpico 5mo ago
    I've yet to meet anyone outside that likes AI except for manager or when people are pretending for their bosses at work. It became a survival tactic.
    - nonethewiser 5mo ago
      Every single software engineer I know uses it pretty heavily.
      - tayo42 5mo ago
        Becasue they like it? Or becasue it happens to better then alternative tools we had?
sourcecodeplz 5mo ago
I think this is very true. They probably got scared of the almost 1b weekly active users of ChatGPT, and how people would rather ask ChatGPT than use Google. It will be a balance but this is a great opportunity for smaller search engines to make a real comeback.
therealdrag0 5mo ago
For what it’s worth, you don’t need to even download DDG. I just set it as my homepage on my iOS safari.
- al_borland 5mo ago
  It can be set as the default search engine in Safari, one of the few options Apple gives for search engines. No need to change your home page. I told my friend this as well, but I think that idea was slightly beyond his current mental model of how things work on the phone. I’ve tried using the homepage method before with Kagi, as the extension to set it as the default search is a pretty ugly hack. I found it created too much friction, as I’m often searching from an existing page.
  - UberFly 5mo ago
    Kagi phone app is pretty nice. I do all my searching in Kagi, the clicked results launch my default browser and the search results stay stable where they are.
- Cider9986 5mo ago
  Customize Search Engine (https://cizzuk.net/projects/cse/ https://cizzuk.net/projects/cse/) allows you to make whatever search engine actually work in the address bar.
- technothrasher 5mo ago
  You have to set it to lite.duckduckgo.com (or noai.duckduckgo.com) or you still get AI crap from DDG too.
data-ottawa 5mo ago
The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life. All conventions and user centricity go out the window with AI feature launches lately. If you look at examples from the last week it’s stuff like posthogs opt-out training, Copilot training, or Google’s antigravity chat-app switch. I’ve had the worst customer experiences of my life in the last few months. My health insurance company decided calling support meant I consented to them saving my voice for model training. They said you can opt-out online, but that option didn’t exist in app or on their website. It was only after calling back and threatening to sue that they added an option to opt-out. This is the daily experience now. Seemingly every company is opting you into selling your data, breaking your workflows, disabling features you use, and force installing AI integrations you have to fight to remove. And several companies are perfectly fine to reenable or reinstall them after removal. It should be no surprise to anyone people are mad. What real value AI does have has been poisoned by premature rollouts (training users it’s crap) and forcing it on people too aggressively.
- al_borland 5mo ago
  After-the-fact opt-outs are something I never trust. Most data selling is opt-in and requires the user to opt-out. It seems to me that when I submit the form, the data would be instantly sold and by the time I get to the opt-out form it’s too late. If this isn’t how it works, I’d be interested to know. The whole idea of these opt-outs seem like smoke and mirrors to act good while still gaining the advantage from the dark pattern. The only way to truly opt-out is to not register or use a service at all. There really needs to be legislation around this.
  - hansvm 5mo ago
    That's how it worked the last time I bought a car. I submitted the opt-outs with the purchase paperwork, the ~sales~ data sharing agreements with 10k of the dealership's closest, paid friends were processed first, and I had no end of bullshit from a hundred companies I'd never interacted with previously.
    - 5mo ago
ninalanyon 5mo ago
> downloading DuckDuckGo. What for? Just use the website via your favourite browser.
- wiether 5mo ago
  > My friends who previously had no interest in technology Their friend are probably the kind of people conflating Chrome/Google with "The Internet" And I think on Android its even less clear the distinction between the browser app and "Google"
- al_borland 5mo ago
  That’s what I told him… just set Safari to use it in Settings, but it seemed like he had already done it and was now invested in using a whole new app just to switch search engines. This is a symptom of the app-based model people now think in.
  - pavon 5mo ago
    And that mindset makes this move even more risky. If people move away from Chrome to DDG, Brave, or Kagi Orion browsers which block tracking by default, then that will harm their ad income even more.
- carlosjobim 5mo ago
  What for? Just tap the icon to open the app.
burnte 5mo ago
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose. Too late, people have started moving. They have to act fast to stop the migration from growing.
NuclearPM 5mo ago
Downloading a search engine website?
- Cider9986 5mo ago
  DuckDuckGo makes a webkit wrapper with their branding. It does actually have some good features built in, but I don't recommend it over Brave or Mullvad Browser.
abustamam 5mo ago
I'm curious — how do non-techies know? During stand-up the other day I was making small talk like "hey did you guys know that Google search is dead" and everyone was like "it is?" and I had to link to the Google IO to prove it because indeed, doing a Google search worked the same way it always had. So I'm wondering how other folks are finding this out.
dogwalker5000 5mo ago
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose. Won’t be surprised if Google thinks their Golden Goose is terminally ill and AI is the replacement. Google is really an information provider powered by ads. That’s what people use their search for - to get information. Google’s search basically has the internet as its backend - information-wise. I think it’s inevitable that AI slop (output from low quality GenAI) will render it useless eventually. So Google’s solution is to build their own AI with information curated by them to try to stay the front page of the internet.
wsc981 5mo ago
> The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life. I’m getting extremely annoyed by the Base44 ads I see on YouTube every other video. First I pressed skip all the time, but the ads keep popping up. So now, every time I see it, I click on the ad and then immediately close the site. At least I can make their aggressive ad strategy a bit more expensive.
- ipaddr 5mo ago
  Its probably why you keep seeing them a click is marked as interest and clicking away doesnt cost anything they refund it.
  - wsc981 5mo ago
    No, for a long time I never clicked. But since I keep seeing the freaking ads, I decided to click on them, because from what I understand they have to pay money for each ad click.
    - ipaddr 5mo ago
      They don't if you click away in a second or two. Spending more time will cost them. But your best strategy is to zoom past those ads quickly no pausing or close the browser when you see them
- gorgmah 5mo ago
  Youtube revanced on your phone + ublock on firefox and you'll never see youtube ads again. There's also a replacement app for android TV that I forgot the name of that works well. Do not use chrome, google nerfed its ad-blocking capabilities a while ago
- account42 5mo ago
  I can't fathom why anyone would still willingly watch ads when there are so many ways to block them online.
DiogenesKynikos 5mo ago
> AI being pushed so hard. What I see is people using AI of their own free will, because it's incredibly useful. It's true that inside tech companies, AI is being pushed into products, but outside of those companies, normal people are rapidly adopting AI for all sorts of daily uses. "I don't know what this symbol on my dishwasher means." -> Ask AI. "Why is my bread not rising properly?" -> Ask AI. These are the types of things that previously would have taken a lot longer to figure out, but that you can get an immediate answer to with AI. That's the fundamental reason why it's taking off. Not because it's being pushed.
- radarsat1 5mo ago
  You can talk all you want about generalization and reasoning ability and AGI, but the fact is that it's also useful simply as a really user friendly database. Even if it's only able to report facts from its dataset or perform simple synthesis of search results. That it can actually reason to a certain extent is bonus points.
shanewei 5mo ago
[flagged]
VerifiedReports 5mo ago
Google has been ever-worsening trash for years. Their "AI" bullshit did in fact push me to finally make DuckDuckGo my default page. Happy to hear others are switching too.
thaumasiotes 5mo ago
DDG has the same AI overview at the top of their search results that Google does. What's the goal of switching?
- polyamid23 5mo ago
  https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
  - hd4 5mo ago
    the default is still the AI'ed version though...
    - polyamid23 5mo ago
      Yes but an AI free version exists to which people apparently switch.
rldjbpin 5mo ago
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose. we have moments like this every few years (almost as frequent as crypto waves in recent memory), but they keep chugging along. couple years back it was all about saying the GPTs have replaced search for people and how google is dead. now when they implement the same, it drives people away. i can imagine how it can be difficult to be in their shoes, when any change is met with negativity. no surprise that the core interface has...had not changed all this time. context: left to ddg almost a decade ago in a similar exodus wave.
- Tade0 5mo ago
  All that being said the product is genuinely worse now. The other day I googled "I'll be resolving" in quotation marks as I usually do when I'm unsure if it's idiomatic (or grammatically correct for that matter) English. AI mode replied with: "I'm on it. Tell me what you're working on, and I'll jump right in with the exact steps, scripts, or details you need to tackle it! What exactly are you looking to resolve?" Just give me the damn phrase used in a sentence along with the number of results so that I can assess how common this expression is.
dopidopHN2 5mo ago
Been using Google since they exists. I stopped without any issue and even thinking too much about it 2 years ago. This include work. I use DDG, kagy and the LLM du jour . Again, no friction. No plan. No transition période. I just changed the default search engine on a whim.
giwook 5mo ago
While there is a meaningful subset of the population that will do this, I wonder if the vast majority of people, even if they share the same negative sentiment towards AI and in particular how Google is pushing it in their products, will find the friction in changing up their workflows and routines to be too much to actually change things up. While Google has certainly failed with their products before, by and large as a company they are "too big to fail" at this point so to speak where the myriad products they offer have become a very significant part of the digital infrastructure on which much of the world runs. Anecdotally I've also switched to DuckDuckGo in the past because I didn't want Google looking over my shoulder on my browsing history (this was pre-AI), but I ended up coming back because I felt the search results weren't quite as good (or perhaps it was just in my head, and the differing UI was enough to throw me off). And this may be a contrarian opinion, and while I hate the idea of Google mining all of my data and monetizing it, I actually find value in the AI 'previews' that Google provides (and will often ask it follow up questions as a means of getting 'free' LLM responses back for 'easier' prompts that I don't want to burn Claude tokens on).
- fsflover 5mo ago
  > weren't quite as good A lot of people keep saying this, and yet I never saw a reasonable example. Whenever DDG fails for me, the Google's results are even worse.

dylan604 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  - ethmarks 5mo ago
    > when they bought the successful ads company Could you elaborate on this? What ad company did Google buy?
    - TheGrassyKnoll 5mo ago
      DoubleClick (2008, according to Wikipedia)
    - svth 5mo ago
      doubleclick.net, about 20 years ago.
al_borland 5mo ago
Ads in Search make up a significant percentage of their revenue. It is also the gateway that gets people into the Google ecosystem. Ads make the money, but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there. It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore. I’m always surprised by how much people are still searching for stuff as we’ve moved from the open web to various platforms (Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, etc), but every time I see Google’s revenue breakdown I’m shocked by just how important Search still is to their business. This is from 2024, but shows Search accounting for nearly 57% of revenue. Yes, this is made possible by the AdWords business, but without Search, that 57% goes away, unless that traffic goes to a 3rd party that is also using AdWords and Google were to make the same from 3rd party ads as 1st party. I find that doubtful. https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/google-revenue-breakdown https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/google-revenue-break...
- 48terry 5mo ago
  > It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore. Which is kind of the scary hazard for Google. They made people notice search by their announcements. They drew attention to the thing people took for granted as just how things work. People suddenly have a reason to look critically at it. Google has to hope to god the attention they receive back is actually positive.
- godelski 5mo ago
  > but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there. And let's not forget, these are the same people that when searching for "eBay" will put an ad at the top of the results, linking to eBay, and then place eBay as the top search result. I've found it hilarious that every single search engine does the same thing. You can do it even in Apple's App Store too. (Not seeing the scam I'm talking about? Search a few more times, it'll hit) How does anyone see this as anything but a scam? User clicks the ad? Get paid. User clicks the search result? No pay. Either way, the user gets the same experience. But why the fuck should any company pay for an ad when the user explicitly searched for their product? It's metric hacking. I mean what's their next move? Down rank the explicit result? When making more money requires degrading the product you know we've fucked up
autoexec 5mo ago
The main reason Google loved search was because it was the primary way they got your personal info. Now Chrome gives Googles your entire browsing history, Gmail lets them read your email, youtube tells them what you're interested in, android gives google your entire life offline and suddenly the only thing google search is good for is as just one more website pushing google ads. AI is going to be great at pushing ads. Plus AI trains you to give google even more control. Instead of just presenting you with a list of websites offering different perspectives and opinions on something, Google can just tell you what they want you to know/think (or not tell you anything they'd rather you not know/think about). The more you get used to treating google like an oracle instead of a librarian the easier it will be to manipulate you.
nonethewiser 5mo ago
This is just wrong. They are working AI into search so that AI does not cannablize search. Search goes hand-in-hand with ads.
tayo42 5mo ago
There's a no ads in the Ai result though. And even if they add there isn't space for like 4 or 5 ad results like some searches can return. Some Google searches I have to scroll a whole screen away before I see a real result.
bradley13 5mo ago
This. Google wants to sell advertising. If they can embed advertising into AI and make more money, they will. You ask AI for a product recommendation. It says "Buy X from Acme". Is that paid product placement? Who knows?
RegW 5mo ago
May be search is not the golden goose, perhaps more the carrot that brings the user into range of the shitty stick of ads and data leeching. I'm a bit afraid that although AI is being presented as part of the carrot, it may actually be a shittier stick.

patates 5mo 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. My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they have fear of missing out on AI :(

thewebguyd 5mo ago
> because they have fear of missing out on AI That's been my experience too, both with friends and coworkers. It would seem that the negative sentiment around AI is largely an internet phenomenon. I've yet to run into a hardcore "AI skeptic" irl. People seem either neutral, or enthusiastic about it.
- pesus 5mo ago
  Meanwhile I've never run into anyone who actually likes AI in any form (except for my boss). Most people who dislike it aren't bringing it up at random. I'm sure it has to do with the circles you interact with and their demographics.
- andersonpico 5mo ago
  I've yet to meet anyone outside that likes AI except for manager or when people are pretending for their bosses at work. It became a survival tactic.
  - nonethewiser 5mo ago
    Every single software engineer I know uses it pretty heavily.
    - tayo42 5mo ago
      Becasue they like it? Or becasue it happens to better then alternative tools we had?

sourcecodeplz 5mo ago

I think this is very true. They probably got scared of the almost 1b weekly active users of ChatGPT, and how people would rather ask ChatGPT than use Google. It will be a balance but this is a great opportunity for smaller search engines to make a real comeback.

therealdrag0 5mo ago

For what it’s worth, you don’t need to even download DDG. I just set it as my homepage on my iOS safari.

al_borland 5mo ago
It can be set as the default search engine in Safari, one of the few options Apple gives for search engines. No need to change your home page. I told my friend this as well, but I think that idea was slightly beyond his current mental model of how things work on the phone. I’ve tried using the homepage method before with Kagi, as the extension to set it as the default search is a pretty ugly hack. I found it created too much friction, as I’m often searching from an existing page.
- UberFly 5mo ago
  Kagi phone app is pretty nice. I do all my searching in Kagi, the clicked results launch my default browser and the search results stay stable where they are.
Cider9986 5mo ago
Customize Search Engine (https://cizzuk.net/projects/cse/ https://cizzuk.net/projects/cse/) allows you to make whatever search engine actually work in the address bar.
technothrasher 5mo ago
You have to set it to lite.duckduckgo.com (or noai.duckduckgo.com) or you still get AI crap from DDG too.

data-ottawa 5mo ago

The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life. All conventions and user centricity go out the window with AI feature launches lately. If you look at examples from the last week it’s stuff like posthogs opt-out training, Copilot training, or Google’s antigravity chat-app switch. I’ve had the worst customer experiences of my life in the last few months. My health insurance company decided calling support meant I consented to them saving my voice for model training. They said you can opt-out online, but that option didn’t exist in app or on their website. It was only after calling back and threatening to sue that they added an option to opt-out. This is the daily experience now. Seemingly every company is opting you into selling your data, breaking your workflows, disabling features you use, and force installing AI integrations you have to fight to remove. And several companies are perfectly fine to reenable or reinstall them after removal. It should be no surprise to anyone people are mad. What real value AI does have has been poisoned by premature rollouts (training users it’s crap) and forcing it on people too aggressively.

al_borland 5mo ago
After-the-fact opt-outs are something I never trust. Most data selling is opt-in and requires the user to opt-out. It seems to me that when I submit the form, the data would be instantly sold and by the time I get to the opt-out form it’s too late. If this isn’t how it works, I’d be interested to know. The whole idea of these opt-outs seem like smoke and mirrors to act good while still gaining the advantage from the dark pattern. The only way to truly opt-out is to not register or use a service at all. There really needs to be legislation around this.
- hansvm 5mo ago
  That's how it worked the last time I bought a car. I submitted the opt-outs with the purchase paperwork, the ~sales~ data sharing agreements with 10k of the dealership's closest, paid friends were processed first, and I had no end of bullshit from a hundred companies I'd never interacted with previously.
  - 5mo ago

ninalanyon 5mo ago

> downloading DuckDuckGo. What for? Just use the website via your favourite browser.

wiether 5mo ago
> My friends who previously had no interest in technology Their friend are probably the kind of people conflating Chrome/Google with "The Internet" And I think on Android its even less clear the distinction between the browser app and "Google"
al_borland 5mo ago
That’s what I told him… just set Safari to use it in Settings, but it seemed like he had already done it and was now invested in using a whole new app just to switch search engines. This is a symptom of the app-based model people now think in.
- pavon 5mo ago
  And that mindset makes this move even more risky. If people move away from Chrome to DDG, Brave, or Kagi Orion browsers which block tracking by default, then that will harm their ad income even more.
carlosjobim 5mo ago
What for? Just tap the icon to open the app.

burnte 5mo ago

> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose. Too late, people have started moving. They have to act fast to stop the migration from growing.

NuclearPM 5mo ago

Downloading a search engine website?

Cider9986 5mo ago
DuckDuckGo makes a webkit wrapper with their branding. It does actually have some good features built in, but I don't recommend it over Brave or Mullvad Browser.

abustamam 5mo ago

I'm curious — how do non-techies know? During stand-up the other day I was making small talk like "hey did you guys know that Google search is dead" and everyone was like "it is?" and I had to link to the Google IO to prove it because indeed, doing a Google search worked the same way it always had. So I'm wondering how other folks are finding this out.

dogwalker5000 5mo ago

> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose. Won’t be surprised if Google thinks their Golden Goose is terminally ill and AI is the replacement. Google is really an information provider powered by ads. That’s what people use their search for - to get information. Google’s search basically has the internet as its backend - information-wise. I think it’s inevitable that AI slop (output from low quality GenAI) will render it useless eventually. So Google’s solution is to build their own AI with information curated by them to try to stay the front page of the internet.

wsc981 5mo ago

> The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life. I’m getting extremely annoyed by the Base44 ads I see on YouTube every other video. First I pressed skip all the time, but the ads keep popping up. So now, every time I see it, I click on the ad and then immediately close the site. At least I can make their aggressive ad strategy a bit more expensive.

ipaddr 5mo ago
Its probably why you keep seeing them a click is marked as interest and clicking away doesnt cost anything they refund it.
- wsc981 5mo ago
  No, for a long time I never clicked. But since I keep seeing the freaking ads, I decided to click on them, because from what I understand they have to pay money for each ad click.
  - ipaddr 5mo ago
    They don't if you click away in a second or two. Spending more time will cost them. But your best strategy is to zoom past those ads quickly no pausing or close the browser when you see them
gorgmah 5mo ago
Youtube revanced on your phone + ublock on firefox and you'll never see youtube ads again. There's also a replacement app for android TV that I forgot the name of that works well. Do not use chrome, google nerfed its ad-blocking capabilities a while ago
account42 5mo ago
I can't fathom why anyone would still willingly watch ads when there are so many ways to block them online.

DiogenesKynikos 5mo ago

> AI being pushed so hard. What I see is people using AI of their own free will, because it's incredibly useful. It's true that inside tech companies, AI is being pushed into products, but outside of those companies, normal people are rapidly adopting AI for all sorts of daily uses. "I don't know what this symbol on my dishwasher means." -> Ask AI. "Why is my bread not rising properly?" -> Ask AI. These are the types of things that previously would have taken a lot longer to figure out, but that you can get an immediate answer to with AI. That's the fundamental reason why it's taking off. Not because it's being pushed.

radarsat1 5mo ago
You can talk all you want about generalization and reasoning ability and AGI, but the fact is that it's also useful simply as a really user friendly database. Even if it's only able to report facts from its dataset or perform simple synthesis of search results. That it can actually reason to a certain extent is bonus points.

shanewei 5mo ago

[flagged]

VerifiedReports 5mo ago

Google has been ever-worsening trash for years. Their "AI" bullshit did in fact push me to finally make DuckDuckGo my default page. Happy to hear others are switching too.

thaumasiotes 5mo ago

DDG has the same AI overview at the top of their search results that Google does. What's the goal of switching?

polyamid23 5mo ago
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
- hd4 5mo ago
  the default is still the AI'ed version though...
  - polyamid23 5mo ago
    Yes but an AI free version exists to which people apparently switch.

rldjbpin 5mo ago

> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose. we have moments like this every few years (almost as frequent as crypto waves in recent memory), but they keep chugging along. couple years back it was all about saying the GPTs have replaced search for people and how google is dead. now when they implement the same, it drives people away. i can imagine how it can be difficult to be in their shoes, when any change is met with negativity. no surprise that the core interface has...had not changed all this time. context: left to ddg almost a decade ago in a similar exodus wave.

Tade0 5mo ago
All that being said the product is genuinely worse now. The other day I googled "I'll be resolving" in quotation marks as I usually do when I'm unsure if it's idiomatic (or grammatically correct for that matter) English. AI mode replied with: "I'm on it. Tell me what you're working on, and I'll jump right in with the exact steps, scripts, or details you need to tackle it! What exactly are you looking to resolve?" Just give me the damn phrase used in a sentence along with the number of results so that I can assess how common this expression is.

dopidopHN2 5mo ago

Been using Google since they exists. I stopped without any issue and even thinking too much about it 2 years ago. This include work. I use DDG, kagy and the LLM du jour . Again, no friction. No plan. No transition période. I just changed the default search engine on a whim.

giwook 5mo ago

While there is a meaningful subset of the population that will do this, I wonder if the vast majority of people, even if they share the same negative sentiment towards AI and in particular how Google is pushing it in their products, will find the friction in changing up their workflows and routines to be too much to actually change things up. While Google has certainly failed with their products before, by and large as a company they are "too big to fail" at this point so to speak where the myriad products they offer have become a very significant part of the digital infrastructure on which much of the world runs. Anecdotally I've also switched to DuckDuckGo in the past because I didn't want Google looking over my shoulder on my browsing history (this was pre-AI), but I ended up coming back because I felt the search results weren't quite as good (or perhaps it was just in my head, and the differing UI was enough to throw me off). And this may be a contrarian opinion, and while I hate the idea of Google mining all of my data and monetizing it, I actually find value in the AI 'previews' that Google provides (and will often ask it follow up questions as a means of getting 'free' LLM responses back for 'easier' prompts that I don't want to burn Claude tokens on).

fsflover 5mo ago
> weren't quite as good A lot of people keep saying this, and yet I never saw a reasonable example. Whenever DDG fails for me, the Google's results are even worse.