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

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?

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.

Google has 90% market share. DDG has 0.7%. I don't have a POV on whether AI mode is good or not, but surely there's gonna be some people who dislike it, and even if that's a tiny percentage, it can be a huge boost to DDG.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I like the AI mode, but only because Google intentionally destroyed their search engine. There wasn't any real competition back then, but now everyone has access to AI. They're frantically trying to keep their search engine customers.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I rarely use Google for search, but I've actually gone back a few times just to use the AI search function. Occasionally it is useful, especially when I can't think of the correct term to search for.

But recently I had an entertaining experience with it. I was trying to apply a math technique to an application it wasn't normally used for, and I figured that somewhere out there was a paper or two explaining how to do what I was attempting. So, I tried Googling, and the response was something like:

"You appear to be working with two completely different areas of mathematics, which have absolutely no connections between them. That's fascinating! Would you like to know more about either of these two completely separated subjects which have nothing to do with each other?"

Not useful, Google, but definitely good for a laugh.

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.

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.

Wait, Duck Duck Go has some 50 million MAUs and that went to 65 million MAUs or so. Google has 5 billion MAUs, so some 15/5000 users went to Duck Duck Go. That doesn't seem damning. 99.97% of Google users didn't go to DDG.

I've been using it a lot in recent months, even though I was very critical about this in the past.

Of course, asking it to give yes/no answers or specific numbers is asking for trouble, but finally I can let something else read the SEOed garbage, point me in the right direction and let me browse the search results in a much more pleasant way than before.

I'm in these stats I think. But mostly because I was trying to do an exact search ("something to search") and discovered that google just ignores it.

There's a local search engine with a motto that translates to something like "Find what you don't know." Google has seemingly adapted "find what you don't want."

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...

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.

More like Google started requiring a captcha in Firefox mobile

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?

For those that don't know, DDG already has an AI mode: duck.ai

when I saw this headline my first thought was: wow DDG must not have a lot of users.

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.

Feel duckduckgo can make an API for agent usage of search engine

I’d like to see the total number of visits. Also, I hope no one is reading this as a 28% reduction in Google use.

How much traffic does ddg get normally? For such a small player, 28% could very well be normal variance.

Neither Google nor Kagi has an .onion address. Unlike DDG

Why would that be problematic? People are AI outraged. Some of them will move. Those who stay like it better.

... 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.

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.

Feels like google is purposely downgrading non-AI search results

Instead of move to duck duck go I just stopped using search

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?

AI Mode is pretty good. It's quite reliable and much faster than any LLM chatbot.

AI Overviews are pretty bad though.

Both can be true. A small number dropping off could be a big boost for DDG.

Let’s be honest: ai mode is less shit than the ads that, for some searches, all but replace all legitimate content.

But it is still shit compared to a search engine. Which Google no longer is.

There’s a real opening for actual search engines now.

wheels gotta turn even if driver is heading towards ledge

I moved from ddg to Google ai. I find it really awesome

that 28% is what, 3 people?

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.

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.

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.

Duckduckgo.com has a AI advisor too. I know not of Google's, I really do not give a soft hoot.

The DDG one is good, useful

> 28% more visits

So, from 3 to 4 people?

That will fall again and everyone will be back to google

Consumers have spoken. They hate AI. Woe unto those tech companies who fail to listen. Your competitors will be happy to take your customers.

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.

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.

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.

0.1% to 0.128% is 28% as well

The problem with DDG is they don't have their own infra like brave and rely so much on bing...

DuckDuckGo have to change their brand name if they want non-technical people to take them seriously

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.

Yeah, nowadays it is a tragedy to find anything useful on the first results page.

maybe AI agents prefer duckduckgo?

Both statements can be true, you know.

Some people can love AI mode while others hate it.

New Google -> perfect example of en$hi++ification.

What is the source of these numbers? Where is the DDG statement posted? Techcrunch? Thurrot? Links to links to links to nothing

AI mode isn't that terrible.

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Obligatory “I use Kagi” comment since I didn’t see any. /s

But seriously… Kagi is awesome!

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"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...