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.
DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
311–320 of 556 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#312My 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…
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Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 :(
> 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.
I've had conversations in recent months with several friends who are non-tech, "granola" type folks. They pretty universally expressed dislike for and concern about AI, but then when the conversation turned to whether they used it for anything, the all admitted that they do appreciate being able to use it for some tasks. I think it's complicated for a lot of people (myself included).
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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.
I know developers that like it. Not in a hyped way like bosses do, but they do like it.
(I don't know anybody that is actually more productive because of it, but I know people that consistently use it successfully in small tasks.)
I also know people afraid it will make all code worse and their jobs a nightmare. It's harder to find those people because they don't say it out loud, but there are plenty who think this way.
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#315It'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.
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#316I 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…
On the flip side I retrained myself to ask llm questions on my phone or computer browser search bar with the expectation of getting an llm response toy question with no desire to look at anything else.
If I truly want to search I will ignore the llm results, but I like the convenience of a quick llm search that knows "all the things". I get the answer to my question without searching multiple ad-ridden websites (since the ad provider does all the things)
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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.
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#318I 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%.
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you are half decent at cooking it is actually pretty helpful to explore cooking something new. Just like coding it is nice to get specific answers to your specific question and it is pretty easy to reason about the quality using your own experience.
I would be interested in an example of this. LLMs will often combine recipes from random sites. If you're experienced enough at cooking to reason about the quality _for something new to you_, what value is there in an LLM here? I don't see any similarities to coding here.
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#320I just don’t like the name.