You get an "Auto-Generated" "Search Assist" summary at the top of most searches. So... they're using AI, you can just hide the summary. So, the "Ai is not the default" claim is bullshit, and I'm now less trusting of duckduckgo if they're willing to pretend their 'no AI' angle is substantial. 30% increase on the noai.duckduckgo.com subdomain. I wonder what % that is of their total traffic? Can I guess <5%?
Techcrunch mentions this in the last paragraph.
Nice marketing I guess? If techcrunch would lead with pointing out this is just marketing and they're totally an AI company, this article would count as journalism.
Honest question: Are people this stupid? Are techcrunch reporters this credulous and uncritical? I am genuinely completely on board with replacing this kind of 'journalism' with AI summaries of PR releases rather than gild them with fading gleam of actual journalism.
I've been building information extraction and discourse analysis tools for exactly this reason: most 'journalism' is lower effort than a the AI summaries they're complaining about.
"AI is not the default" is not a claim made anywhere AFAICT, especially not with that wording. The only thing you could be referring to is the explicitly no-ai url, which AFAICT has no "Auto-Generated" "Search Assist" (that's kinda the point), and it also hasn't used that phrase ever that I've seen in months.
So I kinda feel I have to ask: did you read the article, or did you read an AI summary?
I've used DDG as my primary search and it was maddening when they put that stupid AI response thing in there last year because it was not helpful and I'm a huge advocate of AI
To be honest, I didn't find DuckDuckGo's AI on the top of their search to be very good anyway compared to the one Google has. However can't say I have cared much as typically if I am searching I don't want an AI response, otherwise I'd just go straight to an AI chat interface in the first place.
The Google one is personalized to use language and sources that you'd prefer. They're building an individual response for each person that is most suited to trick that person into clicking on their ads. For some people they dont care, but I myself dont want a digital clone of me tricking me into buying things.
Salesman have for a long time teaching new salesman to use NLP tricks like matching and mirroring to convince people you're relatable and trustworthy. Google is doing this with all the data they have on you.
I started to find that the AI bit was the most useful part of Google Search. But the actual search results were terrible and now I use Kagi. I like being able to add a question mark and control what becomes AI and what doesn't. I use normal search like a Ctrl F for the internet and don't want it to be too clever.
Yeah, gonna be honest. I ridiculed people for it before, but now I use Google's AI a lot. I haven't used Google in over a decade otherwise and I still don't. I use Brave for search but Google's AI is better than anyone else's for what I do. You heard it guys, I was wrong. I admit it.
My non-tech savvy mother started reading the stuff the Google Search AI answers to for some searches, and she's already fed up with it saying whatever. To her it doesn't matter that the "AI can make mistakes" because (in her own wording) "if it's faulty, don't answer".
There's a difference between "linking to a source that may be incorrect" and "you providing the text that's blatantly wrong", and Google seems too big to care about it.
I find that those "AI summaries" google tends to use by default, are hallucinating liars. I stopped wasting my time with this AI slop spam in general. Any "human" still using AI and targeting me, gets perma-banned without any further discussion. I kind of need ublock origin for EVERYTHING. (Ublock origin is great, but I need this on every level, blocking AI slop spam, blocking Nate's donation-daemon nag-widget for KDE and so forth - ok, the last one is easy to disable, just patching out the part where Nate thinks it is ok to harass people, but for AI slop spam from external sites I need something more effective than ublock origin, kind of like an ublock colossal shield.)
Pretty wild to see this in a technology forum. The whole idea of technology is to do more with less. It inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable. Have you ever wondered how many livelihoods computer programmers have destroyed? Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?
> The whole idea of technology is to do more with less. It inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable
I don't think either of these sentences is true.
> Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?
I didn't say anything about a moral line, I just said that there are a lot of programmers who are very excited to remove themselves from being employable. I didn't even say whether I thought that was good or bad!
I think that a lot of those overly enthusiastic engineer AI fanboys are just playing a rational game driven by their perception that AI is a effective substitute for them, and that the only way to survive the comming culling is by being seen on the market as something an AI thought leader.
Basically, signalling that they are going to be cooperative subjects for the enemy's occupation of the land.
"I, for one, welcome our new giant insect overlords" is, IMHO, the operative meme here.
Others are just addicted, the cycle of fast interaction and reward in coding agents is not very different from gambling or crack cocaine.
I think the prevailing mindset amongst developers who use LLMs is that actually LLMs are more of an effective augmentation of programming tools in the same way that an IDE is, and the marketing angle comes from perceived demand for that augmented skill set.
Many developers even seem to predict an increase in demand in the medium to long term as AI written systems increasingly begin to need human attention.
I think the hyper enthusiastic ones are more vocal, but there's a quieter and larger group who are somewhat more measured about it.
Yes, I am addicted to food and shelter and to being able to work in the profession that I specialized in and spent years learning to do well. Without these things I would literally die.
People need to be independently rich, or be extremelly frugal to not care about the hypothetical obsolescence of their jobs.
What the fuck do you expect? That people just cheer a brave new world of diminishing salaries and disappearing jobs along with some vague promises that every thing will be alright?
Yes, I absolutely do expect computer programmers to cheer as the brave new world they helped create is ushered in.
How many people here got rich by automating away the jobs of others? I mean, what is this? Others are fair game, but programming is sacred? That's quite simply the peak of absurdity.
That’s pretty much it. I have ai in my tracker, ai in my search engine, ai in my team chat, ai in the os (work computer),… I’ve never asked for it, but I bet I’m being counted as one of those users.
I don't think you understand that there's a difference between a user who wants an AI chatbot and a user who wants to perform a web search, and even if they're the exact same user, they expect for a web search to operate like a web search and not like a chatbot.
I don't think anyone who works in product management at any company in 2026 understands this, so you're not alone.
You have to ask: Why is Google pushing the AI results? You would think that this would impact their ad revenue. Since Google is fundamentally an ad company, this deserves a closer look.
My suspicion - for which I have no proof - is this: With search results, Google marks the ads. The marking has gotten ever more subtle over the years, but it's there. If you want to avoid clicking on ads, you can. With AI, Google wants to integrate ads seamlessly into the results. If you search for widgets, and Acme Corp. has paid Google enough, the AI summary will praise the virtues of Acme's widgets. And the user will have no idea that this is paid placement, instead of a summary of product reviews, etc..
The simple answer is due to popular demand. I remember when people were doom-posting about how chat GPT was making google obsolete before Google introduced AI summaries, and no one has been saying that after Google introduced it.
I think a lot of people aren't actually against AI itself. Personally I just want to choose when I need a chatbot and when I want a normal list of links. Over the last few years, that line has started getting pretty blurry
I've weirdly found that I like the Google AI mode in specific cases, and I find that the hybrid is the worst of the two worlds. There are some cases where I don't know exactly what I'm looking for and I want the AI to curate results. In other cases, I know what I'm looking for and I want to read the OG source.
The AI popup is the worst and will hallucinate answers from Reddit comments. I specifically had it ask me a nonsense question which was literally just someone's Reddit comment suggesting a follow-on topic B to the search topic A. The AI mode will _sometimes_ be useful enough to prompt into doing the search and summarization for me and get me just enough info and some links to continue the work myself.
Unfortunately DDG is still horrible for non-English results. As are most "smaller" search engines. I rotate through them every now and then to try. Is there a meta search engine that uses country specific engines depending on searches anyone can recommend?
My issue with DDG AI result is that sometimes I would accidentally hit the "more" button to expand the result and it would begin a painfully slow crawl of text that pushed the results I was actually interested in further and further down the page. It was usually preferable to refresh rather than wait. So this is a welcome change.
I switched to DDG search three months ago, and unfortunately it's much inferior to Google. Maybe I've subconsciously optimized my queries for Google these past 20 years and need to rethink how to query using DDG, though.
I will say it's nice to have them actually honour keywords in searches that google has made harder and harder to discover and seems to ignore at will (inurl: site: etc)
The funniest one for me in google is +"foo" they decided people didn't actually mean it, so they changed it to +""foo"" - then when we all started doing that, they made the new secret "yes I really want that string" to be +"""foo"""
> Since then, traffic to DuckDuckGo has been booming. Last week, the company noted that web visits to its no-AI search page were up nearly 30% week-over-week, and its U.S. app installs were also up 18.1% week-over-week, with U.S. iOS app installs peaking at 69.9% week-over-week growth.
Of course there are no absolute numbers or scale. This is just an advertisement for DuckDuckGo. It's gross that previously respected tech publications run this kind of slop for clicks
I switched to duckduckgo last week and i am really loving it. I tried their browser but I was getting a lot of 'this browswer is no longer supported messages'. I think I will try brave next.
I've been liking the Brave browser. The only thing I dislike is how many damn Cloudflare captcha's I have to go through all across the web. However in a way this may actually be a feature as I believe it shows that Brave's fingerprinting protections are actually effective. I didn't get these on other browsers as they were likely very easily fingerprinted.
I did have one site which told me I needed to use Chrome, Edge, or Firefox to use their site. Which kind of made me laugh considering the engine Brave uses. It was a really interactive JS heavy training site, so I guess they really wanted to be sure the browser was compatible to avoid support issues.
If you're on macOS, take a look at Orion from the team behind Kagi Search. It runs on WebKit, is really light on battery usage, doesn't come bundled with crypto stuff or AI agents, and still supports Chrome and Firefox extensions natively
Interesting. I hid the Ask Leo button eons ago when it showed up, so I never feel an "AI encroach."
That being said, I've used "Ask Leo" a handful of time, with mixed results. It's really good for "Give me the TLDR" or "Find the part of the page that talks about X".
The logical business opportunity in the current LLM-boom is to create a bunch of AI-less services and products, and then charge money to access them.
Think of premium branding analogy: masses get cheap AI slop, wealthy get high quality human-curated and human-created produce. Like organic vs regular food.
This only works if your business is large enough that you and all your competitors aren't expected to have humans doing everything already, but small enough that going AI won't boost your valuation by much. My intuition is that the intersection is pretty much empty.
Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism touches on this concept, where there's a constantly shifting opposition to the market that itself becomes engulfed in its own market, to be advertised.
So for example all the productivity/digital detox channels and videos are themselves a consumer demand to be watched on YouTube, on phones. And now we have anti-AI products marking themselves higher for a feature that didn't previously exist. It's like the tree of capital gets split at every turn.
I just stopped paying for Kagi as I personally found I stopped using search as much now that I am paying for an AI chatbot. So I have now switched to using DDG. I personally think Kagi did often have better results. I sometimes find myself adding the `!g` bang to my search so I can get the Google search results as sometimes DDG lets me down. I didn't do this much at all when I was using Kagi.
But this is also just my anecdotal experience and I haven't been on DDG for long yet since Kagi, so my perspective may not be proper yet.
I find DDG results to be lower quality than Kagi, have never liked Bing's index. I also frequently use the personalized site rankings feature in Kagi to strip out known junky sites
Far worse, in my experience. DDG was my first attempt to switch off Google, but the results just weren't very good and I frequently had to use the !g query option to get good results. With Kagi, I consistently get better results than Google.
DDG would be a lot better if lite.duckduckgo.com didn't automatically block anyone who looks deeper than 200 search results as a bot and then force a JS only challenge on the lite page (that crashes old browsers). I think this false positive could be solved by DDG lite returning more than 10 results per page.
So, Google killing off google search, is probably the number #1 reason for DuckDuckGo growing - that and how AI ruins everything now.
Unfortunately, whenever I used DuckDuckGo, the search results were also crap - and the User Interface was crap too. For some reason these web-searches suck, from A to Z, starting at the UI, but more importantly showing search "results" that are really qualitatively not good or inclusive. We already HAD good results - Google search used to be usable, then Google killed it off deliberately. Some inspiration Google appears to have taken from youtube, where you can search for "xyz", and it shows you "abc" instead after a while, which is horrible but not totally horrible as you may just watch another video. But for exact text search, copying that was stupid. Google ruined its search engine deliberately over several years, hoping that people will never notice it. And now we should use this crap AI garbage "search"? That is a privatized web. I refuse to help transition to private actors controlling the www. For similar reasons I do not use AMP and recommend everyone to not fall for the trap Google puts at you.
Either way, someone can hopefully tell the DuckDuckGo team to offer alternatives that do not suck in their search engine. (Qwant also sucks, by the way - they just copy/pasted Google's search UI; perhaps some people want it, I don't. I want oldschool search. Simple. Stay simple. Don't clutter the UI. Don't add garbage. Don't lie to the user. And so forth.)
This is just marketing.
You get an "Auto-Generated" "Search Assist" summary at the top of most searches. So... they're using AI, you can just hide the summary. So, the "Ai is not the default" claim is bullshit, and I'm now less trusting of duckduckgo if they're willing to pretend their 'no AI' angle is substantial. 30% increase on the noai.duckduckgo.com subdomain. I wonder what % that is of their total traffic? Can I guess <5%?
Techcrunch mentions this in the last paragraph.
Nice marketing I guess? If techcrunch would lead with pointing out this is just marketing and they're totally an AI company, this article would count as journalism.
Honest question: Are people this stupid? Are techcrunch reporters this credulous and uncritical? I am genuinely completely on board with replacing this kind of 'journalism' with AI summaries of PR releases rather than gild them with fading gleam of actual journalism.
I've been building information extraction and discourse analysis tools for exactly this reason: most 'journalism' is lower effort than a the AI summaries they're complaining about.
What is the AI going to summarize once journalism is dead?
So I kinda feel I have to ask: did you read the article, or did you read an AI summary?
You're doing these in the wrong order.
Everything is marketing now
Where was this claim made? Nowhere in the article says that.
Salesman have for a long time teaching new salesman to use NLP tricks like matching and mirroring to convince people you're relatable and trustworthy. Google is doing this with all the data they have on you.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033
Where can I find such accommodating customers myself?
There's a difference between "linking to a source that may be incorrect" and "you providing the text that's blatantly wrong", and Google seems too big to care about it.
People call it hallucinating. I think it is lying. Google etc.. became a huge liar. All those AI slop companies are lying to the people now.
I find that those "AI summaries" google tends to use by default, are hallucinating liars. I stopped wasting my time with this AI slop spam in general. Any "human" still using AI and targeting me, gets perma-banned without any further discussion. I kind of need ublock origin for EVERYTHING. (Ublock origin is great, but I need this on every level, blocking AI slop spam, blocking Nate's donation-daemon nag-widget for KDE and so forth - ok, the last one is easy to disable, just patching out the part where Nate thinks it is ok to harass people, but for AI slop spam from external sites I need something more effective than ublock origin, kind of like an ublock colossal shield.)
I think it's reasonable to assume that Google artificially nerfed its search engine before they pushed so massively for AI.
I don't think either of these sentences is true.
> Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?
I didn't say anything about a moral line, I just said that there are a lot of programmers who are very excited to remove themselves from being employable. I didn't even say whether I thought that was good or bad!
Basically, signalling that they are going to be cooperative subjects for the enemy's occupation of the land.
"I, for one, welcome our new giant insect overlords" is, IMHO, the operative meme here.
Others are just addicted, the cycle of fast interaction and reward in coding agents is not very different from gambling or crack cocaine.
Many developers even seem to predict an increase in demand in the medium to long term as AI written systems increasingly begin to need human attention.
I think the hyper enthusiastic ones are more vocal, but there's a quieter and larger group who are somewhat more measured about it.
What the fuck do you expect? That people just cheer a brave new world of diminishing salaries and disappearing jobs along with some vague promises that every thing will be alright?
How many people here got rich by automating away the jobs of others? I mean, what is this? Others are fair game, but programming is sacred? That's quite simply the peak of absurdity.
Unionize.
thats a lot of c-suites
(or the anti-ai crowd is more vocal than the occasional chatgpt user)
but its also obviously not true that "AI is only popular with AI providers and delusional C-suites.
i hate unsolicited ai in my software as much as the next guy. but it’s silly to claim ai isn’t popular just because you don’t like it.
anything else with 50MM subscribers would reasonably be called “popular”.
Furthermore, where did that number come from? What does "active" mean? What does "user" mean?
https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
weekly and monthly active users are common industry terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_users
my comment is not in support of google's ai search. or ai in general.
just pushing back on "ai is not popular", because it is obviously popular by any reasonable metric.
I don't think anyone who works in product management at any company in 2026 understands this, so you're not alone.
by any reasonable metric, ai is popular. that doesn't change just because you super-duper hate it.
your insistence that i dont understand something unrelated to the point of my comment is weird.
My suspicion - for which I have no proof - is this: With search results, Google marks the ads. The marking has gotten ever more subtle over the years, but it's there. If you want to avoid clicking on ads, you can. With AI, Google wants to integrate ads seamlessly into the results. If you search for widgets, and Acme Corp. has paid Google enough, the AI summary will praise the virtues of Acme's widgets. And the user will have no idea that this is paid placement, instead of a summary of product reviews, etc..
The AI popup is the worst and will hallucinate answers from Reddit comments. I specifically had it ask me a nonsense question which was literally just someone's Reddit comment suggesting a follow-on topic B to the search topic A. The AI mode will _sometimes_ be useful enough to prompt into doing the search and summarization for me and get me just enough info and some links to continue the work myself.
Better privacy, good results, no drama, first search engine to include bangs, and its free!
DuckDuckGo results are even more frustrating than the currently-terrible version of Google for finding good information IMO.
For some context sensitive searches where words overlap with more common topics I have a Kagi subscription.
The funniest one for me in google is +"foo" they decided people didn't actually mean it, so they changed it to +""foo"" - then when we all started doing that, they made the new secret "yes I really want that string" to be +"""foo"""
DDG today has two search options, IMO, both could get some improvement.
Of course there are no absolute numbers or scale. This is just an advertisement for DuckDuckGo. It's gross that previously respected tech publications run this kind of slop for clicks
I did have one site which told me I needed to use Chrome, Edge, or Firefox to use their site. Which kind of made me laugh considering the engine Brave uses. It was a really interactive JS heavy training site, so I guess they really wanted to be sure the browser was compatible to avoid support issues.
If you're just trying new browsers to see what's out there and clean, I've really liked Orion.
That being said, I've used "Ask Leo" a handful of time, with mixed results. It's really good for "Give me the TLDR" or "Find the part of the page that talks about X".
Think of premium branding analogy: masses get cheap AI slop, wealthy get high quality human-curated and human-created produce. Like organic vs regular food.
So for example all the productivity/digital detox channels and videos are themselves a consumer demand to be watched on YouTube, on phones. And now we have anti-AI products marking themselves higher for a feature that didn't previously exist. It's like the tree of capital gets split at every turn.
But this is also just my anecdotal experience and I haven't been on DDG for long yet since Kagi, so my perspective may not be proper yet.
DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296649
Unfortunately, whenever I used DuckDuckGo, the search results were also crap - and the User Interface was crap too. For some reason these web-searches suck, from A to Z, starting at the UI, but more importantly showing search "results" that are really qualitatively not good or inclusive. We already HAD good results - Google search used to be usable, then Google killed it off deliberately. Some inspiration Google appears to have taken from youtube, where you can search for "xyz", and it shows you "abc" instead after a while, which is horrible but not totally horrible as you may just watch another video. But for exact text search, copying that was stupid. Google ruined its search engine deliberately over several years, hoping that people will never notice it. And now we should use this crap AI garbage "search"? That is a privatized web. I refuse to help transition to private actors controlling the www. For similar reasons I do not use AMP and recommend everyone to not fall for the trap Google puts at you.
Either way, someone can hopefully tell the DuckDuckGo team to offer alternatives that do not suck in their search engine. (Qwant also sucks, by the way - they just copy/pasted Google's search UI; perhaps some people want it, I don't. I want oldschool search. Simple. Stay simple. Don't clutter the UI. Don't add garbage. Don't lie to the user. And so forth.)