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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

#251

Post by al_borland »

ninalanyon wrote: post #243
al_borland wrote: post #5

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.

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

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.

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

#252

Post by wiether »

osigurdson wrote: post #28

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.

People already talked about the Kagi Quick Answer feature with the question mark.

But if you still want ChatGPT/Claude, then you simply create a custom bang and associate it with something like `https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s`

So now in your address bar you type "how to center a div !gpt" and it will start a session with your query

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

#253

Post by redsocksfan45 »

rolph wrote: post #194
eithed wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own? I think this is a step beyond that - why should people be creating cooking websites when you can ask LLM how to cook given thing, while indeed, serving their own ads. It's the continuation of "we own content other people produce" policy

recall the pizza sauce glue trick, to stop cheese from sliding off. there are other such goodies like mashed potatoes with broken lightbulb gravy, or fiberglass omelette, enjoyed by beldar conehead. i wouldnt trust an AI for any recipe that i dont have personal experience with. the safety rails are not very strong yet.

There are virtually no combinations of food which are toxic, you can mix any food with any food and, while it might not be good, it will still be food. (The only exception I know of is alcohol and mushrooms containing coprine, e.g. inky caps)

Point is, unless you're stupid enough to add glue or broken glass to your meal just because a recipe told you to, it's perfectly safe. More than just safe, LLM recipes these days are utterly boring in their normalacy, and, unlike cookbook recipes, can dynamically adapt to what you actually have in your pantry.

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

#254

Post by al_borland »

data-ottawa wrote: post #139
al_borland wrote: post #5

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.

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…

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.

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

#256

Post by meatmanek »

jraph wrote: post #127
Hugsbox wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No need to turn a brand into a verb for this. You look it up.

I still use google as a verb even though I use Kagi.

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

#258

Post by coryrc »

xigoi wrote: post #217
alberto467 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes. It’s just a better experience, 2026 is rough for a recipe site.

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 not, unless you got yourself a copy of Encarta '97.

So you pick up a book at the local library. Librarians picked some books to order in subject matters they aren't expert in. How do you know those are accurate and safe? If the book says to use rice starch glue, how do you know the author didn't just copy that from an LLM? Or make it up?

Trust is fading entirely.

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

#259

Post by al_borland »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #125
al_borland wrote: post #5

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.

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

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.

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

#260

Post by 0123456789ABCDE »

osigurdson wrote: post #28

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.

try this:

  https://chatgpt.com/?q=how%20to%20decompress%20a%20tarball
  https://claude.ai/new?q=how%20to%20create%20a%20tarball
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