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.
DDG has the same AI overview at the top of their search results that Google does. What's the goal of switching?
DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
401–410 of 556 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#402I genuinely find DDG more effective than Google Search. I have used it as a daily driver for 2+ years now. When i cannot find anything with DDG, i try with the !g macro, but results are more often than not even worse.
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you trust the tool that recommended putting glue on pizza to give you a good recipe?
Got anything from 2025 or 2026? AI got better over the last couple of years, and you didn't keep up, and because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.
The fundamental technology is still the same, just with more fossil fuel burning.
> because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.
How? Will it stop being possible to cook without AI?
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#404[dead]
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 o…
> ads in search
Right, but you know what's even more effective than ads in search? Biased (towards paying customers) information in LLM output.
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#406The AI stuff got my wife to switch. So there's that. I've been using DDG for a while.
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#407I switched to DDG about a year ago and it works fine for me. For some queries, Google still surfaces better results, but DDG is good enough that I don't really miss it. The only Google service I haven't been able to replace is YouTube - no real alternative. I still use Google Maps as well, but could probably switch to Apple maps without missing much. For hiking trails, Apple Maps has often been superior. I briefly tr…
For hiking trails, I highly recommend https://www.comaps.app/. It's simply miles ahead of Google Maps and Apple Maps for hike and biking.
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#408My 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.
> 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…
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.
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#409We have all overused a single solution to "finding stuff on the web": the search engine. Now it's dying, killed by AI and by Google's greed. There's no alternative left, no webrings, no web directories. If all your content is now only on your server, you're invisible.
Do your part, link to a website you enjoy.
In some ways the last bastion of the real web are the web comics. Small personal projects where they link to like minded other projects.
Re: DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
#410I've been using Kagi for years and am not looking back. Okay, it costs money; it could sometimes be worse than Google, but the only free cheese is in the mousetrap.