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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

#331
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.

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

#332

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 a search engine website?

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

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#334
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.

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

#335

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 a search engine website?

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.

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

#336

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.

Customize Search Engine (https://cizzuk.net/projects/cse/) allows you to make whatever search engine actually work in the address bar.

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

#337
post #301
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

great question, probably around 1998 ! How is it relevant to 2026 ?

You seemed confused about how to use a search engine combined with media literacy, thinking you'd have to parse 10,000 results.

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

#338
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.

But none of Google's alternative sound any better. I'll bing it. I'll brave it. I'll ecosia it. I'll kagi it. I'll startpage it. I'll yandex it. Okay "I'll brave it" does sound fine, especially in our brave new world, but it's still ambiguous when speaking it.

Duck it isn't bad. My order for best private search engine goes brave>Kagi>Duckduckgo=startpage

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

#339

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.

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.

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

#340
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To me the similarity is I know exactly what I want to do but cannot really remember syntax (coding) or key variables (cooking) like temp and time. But I have enough experience to know if the output makes sense. Either one I can ask an llm a specific question and get a somewhat reliable specific answer that I feel comfortable parsing… this is actually one of the reasons I think I am eventually going to be on the local inference bandwagon. It is not far from being good enough for my use cases. And I will be able to skip the inevitable enshittification.
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