DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
Comments
juancn
qsort
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 ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
mrdependable
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 ownership of the customer relationship. Stores will be a backend warehouse and manufacturer now with Google taking a percentage of all profits.
866-RON-0-FEZ
Maybe it's high time to burn it all down.
Block Googlebot from your sites.
Let's go back to webrings.
xp84
It's certainly long been clear that Google is phasing out even the idea that they serve end-users "links" to other websites. They're just refining the idea and making it more and more explicit. It absolutely places them in an obviously adversarial position to every single other website on the Internet, and anyone who continues to cooperate with Google today is probably handing Google the tools to put them out of business. Unfortunately, whole generations of people have grown up learning that the safest and easiest way to navigate to a website is to type some version of the brand into their browser (which Google likely owns outright) and click the first thing Google spits back, so Google enters this battle holding most of the cards :(
jeltz
It is the same thing as when they pushed for AMP. They wanted to prevent traffic from leaving google.com then too.
dpkirchner
In that case at least they could point out that end users got better results with AMP than they do with news sites w/o ad blockers. The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it.
pluc
The results are not wrong, they are AI. Google wants that to become a distinct thing that is neither. What's a better answer for Google than one that generates more usage? If we all push in the same direction we can make AI work, we just need to accept we will need to hold its hand for a while.
866-RON-0-FEZ
Remember when they stopped serving links for cached pages and instead started hoarding the information for themselves?
eithed
> 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
rolph
[delayed]
alberto467
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.
eithed
This video tells me otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDQds7VZkfg ( Cold Ones - We Drank AI's Horrible Cocktail Ideas). This is a tongue in cheek response though, as LLMs improved significantly since then.
leereeves
> You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes.
Can you really though? Are the results delicious? I've never tried that.
hilariously
It's worse than you think, many recipe sites do not taste test their stuff at all, and often have very stupid instructions.
That being said, an LLM can give creative ideas, mix and match components, but you should not trust the details at all.
ben_w
Case in point, when "minced meat" and "mincemeat" were mixed up: https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/09/american-website-includes-act...
georgeecollins
Exactly! They also have been letting the results of google search get seriously degraded by ads. Would many people prefer AI over google search circa 2010?
They killed their competition and now they will give you the product that gives them the most money.
strifey
This has been their MO with their search for a decade+ now. "Native" results hiding actual search results below the fold killed many 2010s era websites that relied on search traffic.
crazygringo
> 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 need to follow a link, I find the source result links in the AI mode to be a better quality than the search result links.
It's the best of both worlds.
tredre3
> I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great.
But how do make the determination that the answer is good and you should stop reading the page? Vibes?
aprdm
How do you make it without AI ? Are you parsing through millions of pages yourself ?
miltonlost
Hope the answer in the AI response is right!
varenc
> that can also search the web?
Slight digression: Claude/ChatGPT/etc all can search the web, but Google's AI already has a local copy of the web. It's much faster because of Google's TPUs, but also because Google has a copy of almost the entire web available locally. I recall others testing this and they observe that Google doesn't actually make HTTP requests to sites it references. It just uses its local cache. That's an advantage that all others seem to lack.
Of course, I agree that when I want search, I want search. But personally I've found if I want an LLM to very quickly answer a simple question, the type of thing all of them would do an equally good job on, I prefer Google's for its sheer speed.
mrweasel
> I truly don't get Google's move.
Users aren't adopting their AI at the rate shareholders expect, so they now force the adoption at the cost of search.
Legend2440
According to Google, users are adopting it. They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries.
>Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. As people have realized just how much more Search can do for them, they’re searching more than ever before — so much so that last quarter, we saw queries reach an all-time high.
>Another place where we’ve been rapidly innovating is in the Gemini app. Last year at I/O, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today, we’ve surpassed 900 million, more than doubling in a year. In that same time, daily requests have grown over seven times.
Sleaker
Isnt this essentially just slight of hand? Google basically defaults to AI search now doesn't it? So of course it will be 'fastest adopted' it's what is shoved in peoples faces.
If the results are garbage, or people have difficulty with it... Of course number of searches goes up. That doesn't mean the product is better or its not resulting in brand damage.
dpkirchner
These are the same folks that removed the very useful Google cache feature because people weren't using it any more. What they forgot to say is they hid the feature beforehand.
Of course they have more AI queries every day. They have full control over what goes to LLMs and what doesn't.
rolph
[delayed]
mrweasel
While I'm not opposed to the idea that Google AI mode is so good that people use it more, I also feel like the average person only have so many queries per day. Google statement would indicate that people had a number of queries that they just opted to ignore, because find the answers was to cumbersome.
I'm not entirely sure I'm buying that, unless users keep prompting the AI to reduce the amount of reading they need to do. Sort of interrogating the AI, rather than reading a Wikipedia page.
Legend2440
AI mode isn't for queries, it's for questions. You ask it direct, specific things like 'how do I do <x> in <y>' and it provides a fast answer.
People have many more questions in their life than they do queries.
dandanua
The fact that users are using more search queries means they can't find what they want with a lesser number of queries. It seems that Google's PR team doesn't have an incentive to understand that, or thinks that everyone else is stupid.
bluefirebrand
My guess is that they are spinning it as "users enjoy talking to the AI instead of searching, so they do it more"
Rather than "users don't find what they want with the AI as easily so they have to spend longer with it"
gazebo2
I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something, so of course they're seeing high usage. Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.
SirFatty
"I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something"
No, it's not. AI mode is something you have to select (in the search window). There is an AI overview provided with your basic search results.
pbhjpbhj
I agree with their assessment that '"AI mode" is the default' - https://ibb.co/Pz9LqKRb.
That's what I get, in the UK, logged out of Google, from a search in Firefox omnibar using "Google" as provider.
I'm aware that they have other things that can be described as AI modes.
blueg3
That's AI Overview, just like it says at the top of the box.
AI Mode in that screenshot is the tab to the left of All.
khimaros
this has not been my experience on desktop or Android. did you opt into something? are you accessing via browser search or Google.com?
esseph
> Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.
I wonder how much the search results thing is related to language and locality. I have a hunch but I haven't really dug into it.
I live in the US, I speak English, and my browser is normally chrome.
The number of times I've gone to the 2nd page in Google search results you can probably count on one hand in the last 15yr or so.
I use the standard Google search things when I want specifics... Using quotes, site:news.ycombinator.com to search a site, or add a "-" to remove results from that site. I use a "+" when needed. Nothing fancy.
When people say they can't find things in Google search, I'm genuinely baffled. I have a strong suspicion that it has something to do with the combination of browser, locality, and language. Why? Could be tons of reasons for that, some probably anti-competitive on the browser side.
I have tried to use ecosia, start page, duckduckgo, etc. Was never happy with those results and always ended up back at Google search.
I just want to know what's different, you know? I look up some pretty obscure stuff sometimes.
Note: I do normally have my Google account logged in in the browser when doing search, however I have search personalization and history turned off, so that should not be influencing the quality of my search results compared to whatever "baseline" is.
WarmWash
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 legible sentence to find something. In doing so though, they killed a lot of skill that people had developed with google for years.
Basically they made the game worse for pros so it could be better for amateurs. I have never heard a non-tech person complain about google getting worse over the years, and they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.
pbhjpbhj
>"a hard push to improve search for everyday people"
Citation needed. A hard push to change their search offering, sure. To improve it? Well, if by improve you mean 'require more interaction and viewing of more adverts on average before leaving' ...
WarmWash
Again, if you have been on HN since 2009, you are likely on the far fringe of Google's user demographics, which at this point is pretty much "The average human being on Earth".
I would bet all of my money that you never once did a Google search (pre-LLM mania, but maybe even after) that looked like
"What kind of clothing is best for when you are going hiking around the lake, so my feet don't get so cold?"
Sadly, this is how most humans have used a search engine for decades now.
esseph
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.
autoexec
> They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries.
Technically, all the people who google "how do I disable this shitty AI mode in google" would count as "driving an increase in total search queries."
An easy way to make a feature popular is to force it on everyone. Then you can pat yourself on the back when 100% of your users are using it!
baggachipz
I remember when Internet Explorer was the most used browser. The fact that people were just using it to download Chrome doesn't matter to stats.
burnte
I think it's a multifold problem and they've chosen bad solutions.
1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down. 2. "AI everywhere!" put them in a panic, so they shoved am LLM into results, hoping it could pick through bad results and give good data to the user. 3. LLMs are expensive to run, so they're using a cheap model.
Cheap model + bad results = abysmal user experience.
There are too many groups with opposed interests fighting. Ad groups wants worse results so people search more (not realizing this just drives users away). Search groups want a better product so they stop losing users, and the AI group is being given a bad name because management is using their worst AI product on search. So the whole experience is just garbage.
gruez
>1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down.
Why would this work? Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?
alex1138
I don't know how much control Goog has over Youtube despite owning them but I do note in passing they removed dislikes, removed upload dates (apparently?), removed 5 stars. Easier to trick people into ads
The platform has been various kinds of hostile for a few years now
1vuio0pswjnm7
"I truly don't get Google's move."
"AI" gets higher volume of use than search. This was disclosed by Google under oath
More traffic, more usage time, more data collection
elorant
What if their move is to make AI search horrible so that OpenAI has no moves left here because trust in the product collapses?
osigurdson
I don't see search and AI as fundamentally distinct things. Usually I just want an answer.
scottmcmac
Maybe we use search differently, but I very often don't just want an answer, I want to find a website to help me. Maybe it is because I need to do business with a company and need to find their website to interact with them, or maybe I saw a cool site awhile ago that's relevant to what I'm doing now and didn't bookmark it (because I dropped that habit when Google search was good), or want to read the official documentation about a product I bought, that someone already put a lot of effort into making complete enough and digestible to a wide audience... and the LLM responses tend to get in the way.
Like the parent I use good/paid AI when I want an AI response. So, yeah, an omnibox that knows when I want "an answer" and one that knows when I want to find a thing sounds slightly more convenient than switching between two tools, but Google search is not that Omnibox.
ttctciyf
If you don't care about the facticity of the answer, AI is less clicks, granted.
hilariously
I dont think about less keypresses though - google search would let you type two words and get the thing you know you want, an ai search doesn't really fit the mode that old school search folks were using
malfist
For the same reason I read a book instead of just the plot summary on the back cover
gruez
You really want to read the author's life story when searching for a recipe? Or wade through some content marketing plug for some vacuum cleaner shop in Albuquerque when all you want to do is figure out how to change filters on your vacuum? There are definitely gems on the web out there, but chances are I'm not discovering them via search, and I'd rather get the straight answer from the AI.
bluefirebrand
All of this stuff is Google's fault in the first place with page ranking shit they built!
So now you're trusting them to provide the cure?
aprdm
I don't disagree with you, but google search has gone so downhill that I had stopped using it before they moved to the AI approach, which is actually pretty decent.
basisword
I imagine most people aren't actually searching the web these days. They're searching for an answer to a question. They already now the 5-10 websites they use and go to those directly. They're mostly living in walled gardens, streaming services, or Amazon. When they use Google they want an answer and AI provides that.
ubermonkey
Bad results keep you on their site longer, increasing ad revenue.
mauriciolange
I thought the same at first, but now I find myself relying on the AI answer (as it is usually reliable) and, also more and more, I continue interacting in the AI mode on the topic that motivated my search in the first place.
BiraIgnacio
Well, if the marketing teams are being told to reach people using AI or something like that, then Google is just playing to their real customers.
pupppet
They see AI killing the incentive for anyone to produce human-generated content so they're squeezing the last few bucks out of the internet as we know it before it finally goes belly-up.
nomel
My read on it is "AI is taking over internet content generation, and we can't filter because we'll end up filtering everything that makes us the most money"
SecretDreams
Soon, the internet will be so completely full of AI crap enabled by the mega corps that search will be quite a bit less relevant anywho. Maybe google is trying to front run the demise of the internet that they were supposed to protect?
dandanua
The intention is to kill the web in its current form, obviously. If only 1/3 of their users have left, then it is still a win for them in the long run, as they will gain the fraction of content they directly supply to users. Singularity is here and it's spreading faster than a cancer.
shevy-java
> I truly don't get Google's move.
Because Google wants to kill off its search engine here. It is very clear.
> 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 ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
This assumes that Google search is still a high priority for Google. With their privatized adNetwork, they are trying to get people to trust them, and abuse users via their ads. That is their business model. Google is an adCompany. It stopped being a tech company many years ago already.
Also they control the adMarket for the most part. Just look at youtube.
jeffwask
> it's not Google Search
...and it really hasn't been for a good number of years now. I left a while ago when results were all SEO copy pasta blogs this is just a final nail in the coffin.
micromacrofoot
they ruined search a while ago and they want to stop the bleeding
osigurdson
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.
gchamonlive
Kagi does this really nicely, you just add a question mark at the end and it'll add on top of the search results an LLM summary of what's been found. It's subpar in quality but more than enough to aggregate the results by theme
nonethewiser
Yeah you'd need to support it in the term itself. So many queries coming from the url bar. As opposed to a toggle or something. I wonder if we have info on that - what percentage is input in address bar vs google homepage/app.
The problem is that's not discoverable though. The toggle on google.com would be nice but most people probably arent searching that way.
qwerpy
I'm as anti-Google as anyone out there. I block all their ads, refuse to pay for youtube, go out of my way to avoid their hardware, etc. But I have to admit AI mode is great. It's fast, free, not yet cluttered with ads, and useful. I treat it as a search engine that does a fuzzy search rather than the more literal text match search that we're used to.
I recently bought a Bambu 3d printer after Reddit/HN drew my attention to them and AI mode has been really useful for me to learn about my new printer and troubleshoot things. There is so much information and I don't have time to read everything. I just want to ask a targeted question and have something summarize the literature's answers for it.
It will be a sad day when Google inevitably enshittifies it, but for now I'm happy for them to subsidize my expensive LLM queries.
kenhwang
I'm the same way, I hate using Google search for searching because it's basically useless, and their other ecosystem offerings generally get enshittified over time so it's not worth paying for or relying on.
But if they're letting me using AI for free without logging in and I just need a dumb AI slop answer, then I'm more than happy to burn their tokens instead of my own. Any serious work goes to a different LLM provider. The switching cost for moving to a different LLM provider in the future is practically zero.
dgan
"Surely the last time after handing out carrots long enough to kill all competition, they switched from carrots to sticks, that sucks; but look? now they started giving out carrots again!! It will be such a sad day when no more carrots"
qwerpy
“Someone’s handing out free carrots but it may be sticks someday so I’m gonna be mad about it today and grow my own carrots. That’ll show ‘em! My neighbor’s roasted carrots sure do smell good though.”
nonethewiser
>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.
This is the exact use-case, and it makes a lot of sense. The hard part for Google is identifying when someone wants search and when someone wants an AI response. It's somewhat identifiable by the input but of course thats extremely messy to determine systematically.
ajdude
Just do what Kagi does and turn on AI mode only if there's a "?" At the end of the query.
nonethewiser
They are already doing something like that though. It's not just a ? mark, but they are getting some signal from the input and classifying it as a search term or AI prompt. Not all inputs have an AI response.
And a "?" at the end is not going to capture a lot of real LLM prompts like "What should I pack for my vaction? Im going to Florida in September."
I mean you could do something like this. But it's really not much different than other manual search codes that are used by more power users like like "", "site:" etc.
They probably have a term for it but their AI response is just another "embedded result" for lack of a better term. Like displaying the local weather directly at the top when you search "weather", etc.
nemomarx
If you could use something like a ddg bang for it? like !chat at the end of the search and it goes to some router?
wlesieutre
In DDG's case, searching with !ai sends it to duck.ai
al_borland
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.
data-ottawa
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 in the last few months.
My health insurance company decided calling support meant I consented to them saving my voice for model training. They said you can opt-out online, but that option didn’t exist in app or on their website. It was only after calling back and threatening to sue that they added an option to opt-out.
This is the daily experience now. Seemingly every company is opting you into selling your data, breaking your workflows, disabling features you use, and force installing AI integrations you have to fight to remove. And several companies are perfectly fine to reenable or reinstall them after removal.
It should be no surprise to anyone people are mad.
What real value AI does have has been poisoned by premature rollouts (training users it’s crap) and forcing it on people too aggressively.
patates
> 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 :(
thewebguyd
> 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.
andersonpico
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.
nonethewiser
Every single software engineer I know uses it pretty heavily.
pesus
Meanwhile I've never run into anyone who actually likes AI in any form (except for my boss). Most people who dislike it aren't bringing it up at random. I'm sure it has to do with the circles you interact with and their demographics.
nonethewiser
Seems the main claims against it center around:
1. Labor replacement
2. AI is actually bad in-and-of-itself. Doesn't work, not useulf etc.
3. Energy concerns
nikole9696
I'm in my 50s and all my friends and family hate AI. My parents in their 70s can't really comprehend it. They got used to search and want nothing to do with AI. Some company is trying to build an AI data center where they live, and they're livid about it.
Personally, I like it sometimes, but I'm a techie and understand the limitations, and I dislike not being given options to use or not use it.
dylan604
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.
al_borland
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 open web to various platforms (Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, etc), but every time I see Google’s revenue breakdown I’m shocked by just how important Search still is to their business.
This is from 2024, but shows Search accounting for nearly 57% of revenue. Yes, this is made possible by the AdWords business, but without Search, that 57% goes away, unless that traffic goes to a 3rd party that is also using AdWords and Google were to make the same from 3rd party ads as 1st party. I find that doubtful.
https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/google-revenue-break...
48terry
> It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.
Which is kind of the scary hazard for Google. They made people notice search by their announcements. They drew attention to the thing people took for granted as just how things work. People suddenly have a reason to look critically at it. Google has to hope to god the attention they receive back is actually positive.
autoexec
The main reason Google loved search was because it was the primary way they got your personal info. Now Chrome gives Googles your entire browsing history, Gmail lets them read your email, youtube tells them what you're interested in, android gives google your entire life offline and suddenly the only thing google search is good for is as just one more website pushing google ads.
AI is going to be great at pushing ads. Plus AI trains you to give google even more control. Instead of just presenting you with a list of websites offering different perspectives and opinions on something, Google can just tell you what they want you to know/think (or not tell you anything they'd rather you not know/think about). The more you get used to treating google like an oracle instead of a librarian the easier it will be to manipulate you.
jeffwask
They only dominate Ads because they dominate search if everyone leaves Search the ad business grinds to a halt as well. These are the ying and yang of Google.
dylan604
Kind of. They dominate ads because the dominated search when they bought the successful ads company. By that point in time, they already had your profile built, and the further use of search just continues to enhance that profile. But now that ads has its own persistent tracking that dependence on search is not as strong as it used to be
jeffwask
People have reported a decrease in ROI from spending on Google ads already when they no longer control all the eyes and where you rank in what those eyes see when they search, that ROI will drop even more. People will stop paying for Google ads when the ROI is higher on other platforms.
Couple that with the fact that a lot of folks have moved their search to GPT or Claude once those platforms start taking in ad money... that budget will come from somewhere and that's likely existing Google ad buy dollars shifting.
ethmarks
> when they bought the successful ads company
Could you elaborate on this? What ad company did Google buy?
nonethewiser
This is just wrong. They are working AI into search so that AI does not cannablize search. Search goes hand-in-hand with ads.
sourcecodeplz
I think this is very true. They probably got scared of the almost 1b weekly active users of ChatGPT, and how people would rather ask ChatGPT than use Google. It will be a balance but this is a great opportunity for smaller search engines to make a real comeback.
therealdrag0
For what it’s worth, you don’t need to even download DDG. I just set it as my homepage on my iOS safari.
apparent
I wonder if the 28% more visits was mostly among existing users. I skimmed the article and it didn't look like this was broken out. It would be much more impactful/impressive if they brought in a bunch of new users, as opposed to ratcheting up usage among people who were already aware of it.
bko
> 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 number of iOS users hit download on the app though, with installs seeing an average week-on-week growth of 33% and a peak of 69.9%.
Why do they report only relative numbers? These numbers alone are meaningless. This is just lazy reporting.
bee_rider
They wanted to write a story where this was a negative consequence for Google, I suspect, but the absolute numbers wouldn’t have supported that (they mention that it is inconsequential to Google a couple paragraphs in, if your browser can sustain the site for that long. Mine had trouble).
input_sh
They used to have public-facing relative figures located on /traffic, but it looks like they got rid of that page some years back and now it just redirects to the homepage.
Random snapshot of what it looked like: https://web.archive.org/web/20220101023001/https://duckduckg...
sunaookami
Because it's an ad for DuckDuckGo and PCGamer loves anti-AI engagement bait outrage articles because they bring clicks from outraged "gamers" and this brings them ad revenue, too so you are reading an ad for an ad.
phillipcarter
...because the absolute numbers are incredibly low. And I say this as a fan of DDG! It's just the reality we live in; those who are negatively polarized against AI enough to make this sort of change are just very small in number.
mossTechnician
noai.duckduckgo.com probably receives much less traffic than the main domain, which enjoys placement in many prominent browsers (and offers AI overviews by default, although they are far smaller and less likely to appear than on Google). It would be much more interesting to see absolute numbers... in the context of the main site.
ctrlkctrls
The world seems to be fragmenting, into those that see the value in the latest from Google, and those that resist changes like this. I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
I love Google's AI answers and their AI Mode tab. DDG is just Bing or a search vendor proxy, so I've never understood the fascination. At least Perplexity is different to Google. DDG seeing a 28% increase is like Google saying they saw a drop of 0.0000000001% in traffic.
HN crowd forget that the world isn't like us, they didn't grow up with Yahoo and Alta Vista, with Excite etc etc. Our SOP is to resist all change, anytime Apple brings out a new version it'll be the end of Apple according to HN - Apple - the biggest company in the world - what do they know about UI, "Liquid Glass sucks!" :) :)
We're a community in danger of pushing out those new to the tech world, recent graduates will be made to feel unwelcome if we continue to trash everything that the biggest companies in the world do, like we always know better. I implore the community to be more positive about the future, about the technologies that will take us into that future.
malfist
> I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
Don't you have to do that _anyway_? Unless you're just blindly trusting the AI to be correct, and if that's the case, please do enjoy gluing your cheese to your pizza.
48terry
> search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence
How do you know the answer is exact?
> or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
Where do you think that "exact answer" is being scraped and averaged-out from?
SoftTalker
I like having a direct answer to my question "how much oil does my engine take" but as of today I do not trust the answer to be correct, so I still cross check several sources, ideally ones that appear to be authoritative.
dualvariable
I asked claude to dig up the current Ford Bulletin for the engine in my truck to tell me the recommended motor oil. And it found the updated recommendations properly. I wouldn't trust google AI because I know specifically that the recommendations changed, and I don't want whatever the published specs were when the engine was first manufactured, which is out of date (and found on lots of low quality blogs). I don't even trust claude, but it gave me the URL to click on to verify and summarized it well enough that I mostly trusted that it wasn't using the cited technical bulletin and not a bunch of random AI-slop web pages.
ryandrake
I wouldn't trust any 'confident stochastic next-word predictor' to tell me fact. There are official sources of information for these kinds of car maintenance questions.
dualvariable
Better than asking your backyard mechanic buddy who believes that you don't need anything other than 10W40 or something like that. You have always had to know who to trust and what level of work you need to do in order to get to an answer which is satisfactory. And in this case, Claude cited the manufacturer's bulletin which is the actual best source of truth that you're talking about.
pesus
Being critical about AI companies isn't what's pushing new people away from the tech world. The AI companies and the consequences of their actions are, as well as comments like this pretending the issues don't exist and that we need to just be positive about the "future".
And supposing these technologies do take us into the future: when said future is bleak and worse in most ways than what came before, people aren't going to be encouraged or enthusiastic about the tech world.
mrdependable
Are you going to enjoy a future where those different sources can't be found, so now Google requires you to have a subscription that includes data about vehicle repair? The great thing about the web before was that the information was available for everyone, it was decentralized. This is what they are trying to kill.
bigstrat2003
You're entitled to your opinion. But "we should embrace the stuff big tech is doing" does not follow from "let's be welcoming to new entrants to the field". They are, of course, welcome to their opinions as well. But even if they and I disagree on things, that doesn't make them unwelcome. So no, I'm not going to embrace the slop Google is putting out based on a spurious concern over welcoming newcomers.
marginalia_nu
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.
Imnimo
I direct a lot of questions to LLMs, but I want to ask a high-quality model, not the crappy one that Google uses to answer queries. If I'm typing something into Google, it's because I want a search result, not an LLM answer.
xmprt
I've actually changed that. When I type something into Google it's because I want an LLM answer - their search results have been useless for a while now. But that's only because I rarely use Google these days. I'm mostly using DDG to search (I might try Kagi at some point). Google is relegated to my phone when I want a quick answer where accuracy isn't critical without needing to scroll through a bunch of search results/open and read websites on a small screen.
ruszki
Kagi, unfortunately, is getting worse too. I think mainly because they don’t get access. But I’m not sure. I had to fallback more and more to Google, because Kagi couldn’t find exact matches, while Google could. Like texts which I copied from a webpage (for example from Android’s source), and it can’t find it.
Its search results ordering is quite good, but the accessible information for them seems to be shrinking. And quickly.
I’m at the point where I don’t search for complex things anymore. I use Kagi for things which can be found with any search engines. Not because I chose it, but because I was forced. This was not the case a few years back, when I started to use it.
Btw, there was one thing with which Google was superior all along: define <word>. And they fucking killed it in the past months, for a far, far worse solution. Nothing comes even close.
SubiculumCode
I do have to say, and this is from recent observations, not outdated ones, but their AI summaries get things wrong, alot, and these are things that gemini (proper), Claude, or ChatGPT subscription AI's don't get wrong.
sunaookami
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...
SubiculumCode
I've noticed that too. I am sure its because the AI summary runs on almost every query.
deltoidmaximus
If I'm typing something into a google it's usually so I can be hit with a Captcha on my home internet connection and then get search results that aren't even any better than DDG. And DDG has a LLM as well.
pesus
You've got the captcha issue as well? Seems like it's happening constantly now. I suspect Apple Private Relay has something to do with it, but I'm not sure.
floxy
Nope, not exclusively an Apple thing, since I don't use any Apple products at home, and have had an uptick in captcha requests.
fyrabanks
only time i ever have to deal with this anywhere (and i move physical sites a lot) is when using a commercial VPN provider. odd.
256BitChris
From my experience the Google AI mode is more restrictive on what it will let you search for and the content it produces.
I personally have had to use DuckDuckGo to search for things that Gemini finds to be against its instructions to answer.
And I'm not talking about things that are NSFW, but some things that Gemini just doesn't want to discuss.
That's kinda Gemini's problem in general, it just is overly restrictive and doesn't like to talk about anything things that Claude will freely talk about and push against and discuss with you.
rvnx
You are absolutely right, DuckDuckGo is better for porn than Google, but if you want even better results you can use Yandex.
For other things, Grok is quite fast — Perplexity too
chrismarlow9
It's been my default search for years. Lately for quick one shot AI prompts I use duck.ai (they put some basic effort into anonymizing your chat: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/duckai/ai-chat-... ).
For the search, some of the local results are wrong but I live in a very small area so it may be more reliable for highly populated areas. Lately I've been checking out Kagi for a few things just to see what the quality is like on competition. The anonymized chat (proxy) for AI is cool but very small context limit. Good for looking up random questions and they typically include references.
NDlurker
I've been going back and forth between DDG and Google. I have DDG set as default and only use Google if DDG isn't giving me good results.
teejmya
Same. If I need to Google it, I add "!g" to the search terms.
floralhangnail
I use !s for my fallback. I usually don't need the !g unless I want to see CAPTCHAS.
NDlurker
Thanks for the tip; I didn't know about that.
notepad0x90
!g is the best of both worlds.
arikrahman
I'm not sure why people go with DuckDuckGo as their engine as it's just trading Google for Bing. After learning about their deal with Microsoft, I started using Brave Search instead.
dawnerd
It's also pretty ironic for people to ditch Google over ai just to move to another search engine that has AI by default unless you happen to know about the noai subdomain. But it is good that people are willing to break the habit and try alternatives. That's what Google should be scared of.
fckgw
Because they want something they know that resembles the old Google Search which DDG provides.
30minAdayHN
I switched away from Google to Duck a few years back. But I observed that I mostly do !g and end up on Google. I read similar comments from many others on other threads.
Recently I switched to Kagi and has been a very happy customer. I never visited Google after that. Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone.
metalliqaz
Google is better than Duck's backend (Bing or Yahoo, IIRC)
However, I find that most of my queries don't require Google to find the result. Maybe once every couple days I do a search, don't like the results, and then add a "!g". Most of the time it's fine and I get to avoid Google's ecosystem.
specproc
Yeah, same. Switched my default to Duck about a year back although I've still got Google on mobile (something I only just clocked as I type).
Google search had degraded so badly pre-AI, I was already finding it equivalent for most things. The odd few searches benefit from Google, but nowhere near enough to warrant them as a default.
lisplist
I 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 tried OpenStreetMaps years ago, but the lack of traffic data and the fact that it gave me bad directions made it untenable.
nyjah
It's the french open. There's always been a bug with google search where sometimes I have to search 'french open' or 'australian open' twice to get it to give me the google scores. That bug still exists, sometimes it just brings up the site, but now it will also sometimes just go into AI mode and it will refuse to get out of it. Like even when you click for otherwise, it will force its way back.
The google live scores is a great feature. But when it's not coming up, even googling "french open google live scores" doesn't just bring it up every single time. It might if you try, but try multiple times over the day...
SubiculumCode
I dislike the AI summaries always popping up. I do now see an AI mode button. But so far I am not forced into AI mode. Is this happening for other people?
runjake
Append "udm=14" to your Google searches to make this stuff go away (for now, until Google removes it).
You can add a custom search engine to your browser with something like:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
{google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14bratsche
There have been a few times where I found Google's AI mode useful. But most of the time I just want regular search results.
I'm among the people who finally moved to DuckDuckGo as my default. And for the occasional time when I want some AI mode I know how to get to Google.
asciimoo
I'm seeing the same increased activity around my search engine project (https://github.com/asciimoo/hister). While Google's decision is very controversial, it's good to see that people are seeking for alternatives - nice motivation boost to keep developing alternative search projects.
ashm1104
Oh thank God, I am not the only one here, I mean idk why but I am still not so comfortable with AI mode,and I just need Search, like good old search. I feel this all started when people were saying things like google search is dead or gpt will take over..
Also why is AI mode default?
nikole9696
If I want AI, I'll use AI. If I want Search, I want Search. Give me the option. Then again I switched to DDG like, last year.
ymolodtsov
AI Mode is pretty good. It's quite reliable and much faster than any LLM chatbot.
AI Overviews are pretty bad though.
feverzsj
Feels like google is purposely downgrading non-AI search results
bell-cot
They were doing that long before they offered "AI" search results.
vessenes
Both can be true. A small number dropping off could be a big boost for DDG.
ThomPete
That will fall again and everyone will be back to google
bagol
Duckduckgo is blocked in my country. Reddit is blocked in my country. My country is also one of first countries agree to ban free (non playstore) android app installation. My country is so against freedom. What a shitty country.
cryo32
Which country did this so I can avoid the hell out of it?
Also sorry!
benced
... DDG had .7% marketshare (https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share). 28% more visits would take it to .84%. Assuming those all come from Google, that would mean .16% of Google users didn't love AI mode enough to switch.
Classic example of misleading with stats.
onlyrealcuzzo
DDG is probably regularly growing at ~20%+ anyway...
Google's search volume has been growing 12%+ per year for 20+ years, there's obviously much more room for volatility when you're smaller...
hansmayer
Well... it is still a huge relative increase. And who knows where it could lead them, if they can sustain that sort of growth on a weekly basis...compounding and all...
gsky
I moved from ddg to Google ai. I find it really awesome
notepad0x90
I'll have to see Google's stats as well. I went the other way leaving DDG for google AI mode. I use ddg still if I just want it to find a site. if I want answers, I use Google.
I would say it's more than visits that count, how many people are staying in the DDG or Google home page doing things? a lot more with Google I'd think. they've succeeded in trapping me in their product, instead of navigating away, and I'm happier for it. And... i still don't get what people's problem is (quality wise that is), you don't have to use AI results right, and it's pretty obvious what the AI interaction portion of the page is? I'm sure ad blocker extensions can remove it entirely as well. DDG's quality is not just lower, it requires me clicking around to get AI assisted summary.
I just don't get it, is people's time not valuable? even if half the time the AI results are wrong, it offsets (for me - and it's more like 5%) the time I waste clicking on random sites, some of them ad-trodden (where a blocker isn't available), outdated,etc.. and I usually don't even go to the second page of the result where as the AI reviews more than the first page or two to give me a summary. I'm saving lots and lots of time, getting more done with it.
This is tech, not religion, but it feels like people are conflating the two. it's just a tool that's used to search things.
sltr
Scrolling that page felt like getting groped and robbed at the same time. So I much flickering, motion, and distraction. And that with adblock on.
wordpad
> 28% more visits
So, from 3 to 4 people?
josefritzishere
Consumers have spoken. They hate AI. Woe unto those tech companies who fail to listen. Your competitors will be happy to take your customers.
mt_
As someone who has been driving DDG for the past 6 years, i have switched to Google back due to the new AI mode,, its such a nice quick way to check information and validate ideas.. no friction included.
ChrisArchitect
What is the source of these numbers? Where is the DDG statement posted? Techcrunch? Thurrot? Links to links to links to nothing
partiallypro
AI snippets are just terrible, I always just scroll past it. I want to find the website I'm looking for, if I wanted to use AI I'd open up an AI app or website.
jmyeet
If you want to use DDG then go for it. Let people enjoy things, I say. But let's not pretend DDG is suddenly surging, or even relevant really. It's a niche service largely for virtue-signaling by people who insist that "Google sucks". That's their core demographic.
Some Googling claims DDG gets 145M searches per day and claims Google gets ~14B. Well, 14B translates to ~162k QPS. I know for a fact that Google's traffic is significantly higher than that so I'm not sure where that claim comes from.
I honeslty don't believe a significant percentage of Google users even know Sundar made a statement about people loving AI mode or would even care, one way or the other. This is just more marketing fluff trying to will DDG growth into existence.
pjmlp
Yeah, nowadays it is a tragedy to find anything useful on the first results page.
shevy-java
I am trying to find a replacement for google search.
DuckDuckGo was also useless. Qwant just copy/pastes Google's awful UI.
We kind of see that all search engines suck now, but in many cases there is no real reason why that should be the case. For instance, why did Qwant copy/paste Google's horrible UI? There is no logical reason for this other than trying to bait in people who like the Google search UI. I don't like that UI Google chose since like 10 years or more; Google ruined its search engine already way before AI.
We really need a search engine that works and isn't control by a greedy, Evil adCompany. DDG isn't the answer; neither is Qwant.
yieldcrv
0.1% to 0.128% is 28% as well
cute_boi
The problem with DDG is they don't have their own infra like brave and rely so much on bing...
jraph
Yeah, there's no really good option in the search engine space.
noncoml
DuckDuckGo have to change their brand name if they want non-technical people to take them seriously
Hugsbox
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.
jraph
No need to turn a brand into a verb for this.
You look it up.
yegg
Duck it.
jraph
Mind the F being dangerously close to the D on most keyboards here :-)
d--b
maybe AI agents prefer duckduckgo?
Legend2440
Both statements can be true, you know.
Some people can love AI mode while others hate it.
mlongval
New Google -> perfect example of en$hi++ification.
hightrix
Google is the OG of enshittification. When DoubleClick bought Google, I mean when Google bought DoubleClick, that is when Google started printing money in exchange for a terrible user experience.
John7878781
AI mode isn't that terrible.
jeffbee
AI summary isn't bad at all, but people don't understand it and Google hasn't explained it very well. It is just RAG. It is a summarization of the documents that are on the first page of the SERP. People think it is answering their question independently, but that's not what it does. It takes the docs that are top ranked from web search and digests them.
The corresponding "AI overview" feature of Gmail is amazing. It digests the messages that match your search. Because it is using your own docs, the output is way better. Or, at least, mine is. Maybe your inbox is full of lies but mine isn't.
supaflybanzai
Obligatory “I use Kagi” comment since I didn’t see any. /s
But seriously… Kagi is awesome!
root-parent
"Google’s AI Overviews Don't Have an Off Switch. 4 Tricks to Return to Traditional Web Results" - https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/googles-ai-overviews-dont-h...
john_strinlai
they dont even recommend using a different search engine? shame on them.
why bother fiddling with url parameters or switching entire browsers when you can just go to one of many other search sites?
this is just an ad for brave being disguised as something 'helpful'.
notepad0x90
are you a bot?
Why do you need an off switch, are your eyes and fingers not able too coordinate scrolling down past the already half collapsed ai overview section? does it offend you at a spiritual level to see it?
root-parent
As a bot yes...it offends me terribly, at a deep sigmoidic spiritual level...
Google has ~90% of search where DuckDuckGo has <1%.
A ~30% jump of DuckDuckGo is about 0.3% of global search traffic, basically a rounding error for google.
Still, it's an interesting signal, but not nearly enough to worry Google. If the jump had been 300% that would merit some thought.