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

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

#291
post #289
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make it without AI ? Are you parsing through millions of pages yourself ?

No, you engage in what appears to be the lost art of media literacy and abrogate high quality sources.

Right, so I have to do manual work going over 10000000 of results ? Or trusting SEO / google algorthm instead ?

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

#292
post #21

> 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 numbe…

0.2% of google users try out duck duck go after google pushes more AI doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

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

#293
post #291
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you engage in what appears to be the lost art of media literacy and abrogate high quality sources.

Right, so I have to do manual work going over 10000000 of results ? Or trusting SEO / google algorthm instead ?

No... When did you start using the internet?

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

#294
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It started when Google made a hard push to improve search for everyday people. They essentially nerfed "expert google skills" to bolster "noob google skills". Regular people are/were really bad at using google, so google moved towards showing what it thinks you want rather than what you want. They paved over the skill gap between people who understood keywords and word order, and people who just typed in a quasi legi…

I just don't know what I'm doing different, I'm just keyword searching and using a couple of inclusive/exclusive flags. Was I the frog in the pot and now I'm cooked? I don't feel like in search Google any different from maybe 2005 or so.

How do you get the inclusion/exclusion to work? My last few attempts to use “-x” really didn’t exclude what I expected, and almost all the results had “x”. I have seen massive changes since 2005.

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

#295
post #20

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 ev…

> but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. Not me. I really appreciate having both results simultaneously. I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great. I can expand it to see if there's more. Or, if I see that the AI mode didn't understand my brief search query, I just glance at the search results below. And often times, when I do ne…

It replaced some of my most used tools with google search. I used to be able to search "define inoculant" and I would get a definition, synonyms, and even a history of the word usage. Now it's replaced by an often mistaken AI summary. Even "inoculant synonyms" doesn't work.

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why their AI summary model is so bad, yet when you just click through to AI mode it's miles better...

I've noticed that too. I am sure its because the AI summary runs on almost every query.

It also has to be very fast = small

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

#297

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.

thanks for your work. Marginalia is important for the survival of the human internet

https://marginalia-search.com/

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

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to capture more of the value that was previously going to others. That's basically what this has all been leading to. Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own? Now they are going to do the same to e-commerce. Either they are going to let customers buy their products through Google's interface, or they won't be discovered. No more o…

Why would anyone go to google anymore tho? If it doesn't furnish results it's just a chatbot

I would assume that they've A/B-tested any such important change extensively and basically know that it won't affect their numbers for the worse.

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

#299
post #258
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you trust the tool that recommended putting glue on pizza to give you a good recipe?

I have/make rice starch glue. Can you put it on food? How are you supposed to know whether it's food safe? Okay, so you don't trust LLM, so you go to a website instead. And... LLM-generated pages are SEO'd to get the top links. So you can't trust any website now (shoot, so much nonsense even before LLM, just more obvious to some of us). So basically everything on a computer is untrustworthy, directly from an LLM or n…

Presumably you test some things and use common sense for others. Like if you search for "grain filling oak" using an engine like Kagi(because Google just sells you the same product repackaged over and over) then you'll get people telling you variously to buy this grain filler compound that worked on their particular project, or you get people telling you to use drywall patch compound, or watered down wood filler.

The thing is, these things do produce some kind of result that looks like what you want. But it is still up to you to test these things on a project before you rely on them for whatever it is you really wanted them for, and that requirement doesn't go away just because you sourced the information from some LLM, or a book at the library, or Nick Offerman, or whoever else.

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

#300
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.
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