EDIIT :
Apparently, there is an issue with the warning request to disable the ad blocker
I use Fennec F-Droid and Cromite, and I don’t see this issue.
to get around the adblocker warning, use this link.
…Installs?
Do they know there’s a website?
You don’t even need the website. I just set the default search engine to DDG in my browser.
A search app makes zero sense to me.
The DDG app is pretty cool though. It has free app tracking protection.
As a tangent, it’s kind of insane that the NPR app seems to always have like 10x tracking attempts vs tiktok.
So much, this. My brokerage apps are my biggest offenders for phoning to unauthorized parties, makes me nervous as hell.
I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, that I miss using Mullvad but that DDG supplanted them as my VPN of choice, just because there are other anti-tracking and adjacent security Services integrated into my life so seamlessly.
Unrelated to DDG, if you sideload on Android I want to shill HARD for this FDroid package, called Hail, , which when powered with Shizuku can fully suspend apps selectively at will.
So I identify any apps that like to phone home regularly, and just tell them to aggressively take naps until summoned, I feel like I only want to allow 10% of my apps to run to the background regularly. This app gives me a toggle for that, and DDG is my lamp light for selecting the most egregious offenders.
The reason why companies like to push apps over websites is that apps can gather more information about you. Not saying DDG does this, but it is weird.
For their defense this could be to place search bar on main screen, as looks like Google no longer allows to switch to a different search engine in their default launcher.
More people will probably switch when they figure out they don’t need to install anything and can change their default search engine on their current browser.
More people will probably switch when they figure out they don’t need to install anything and can change their default search engine on their current browser.
FTFY
Thank you for this! I changed to duckduckgo just now and it took 5 seconds. Now to see if it works as well as Google.
The bangs are the addictive feature for me. You start by typing
!w lemmyin the URL bar, with DDG already configured as the default search engine, and DDG will directly serve the search result for this term from Wikipedia. There are hundreds of them like!ytfor YouTube or!gmfor Google Maps, and the acronyms are intuitive. https://duckduckgo.com/bangsThis should be a YSK post
It doesn’t and when you discover that, try Kagi.
People here love things to be free and in doing so, they recommend worse search engines.
I like free but will check it out when I have some money, thanks
In case people don’t want to, or can’t access, the article. Apologies for any formatting issues, I’m on my mobile.
Last week, after Google announced its huge overhaul to Search, I overheard a woman on the phone saying she was switching to DuckDuckGo because you can “opt out of using AI.”
“Google just isn’t Google anymore,” she said. It seems that others had the same idea.
At I/O, Google’s annual developer conference, the company said its traditional list of blue links is being replaced by an AI agent that answers queries, executes tasks, and runs background monitoring agents.
The backlash has been sharp.
Some have argued it will kill the open web, while others shared concerns that AI overviews surface inaccurate responses and take away control from users who might not want to use AI. It also overcomplicates simple things. Just try to Google the word “disregard.”
In response to Google’s changes, many have begun defecting to DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused alternative that has never been able to break past Google’s dominance, accounting for only around 2% of the U.S. search market.
During Google’s search antitrust trial in 2023, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg testified that Google’s exclusive default search contracts harmed its ability to pitch itself as the default on other browsers.
“Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out,” Weinberg said Tuesday in a statement, referring to Google’s Search overhaul. “As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want.”
Now it seems that DuckDuckGo is beginning to benefit as consumers flee AI.
DuckDuckGo said U.S. app installs went up 18.1% week-over-week on average during the May 20 to May 25 period, compared to May 13 to May 18. The company said that growth was sustained for six consecutive days and peaked at 30.5% on May 25. On iOS, the rate of install is even higher, with week-over-week growth hitting a 33% average, peaking at 69.9%.
The search engine also said visits to its AI-free search page, noai.duckduckgo.com, averaged 22.7% WoW growth, peaking at 27.7% on May 24. The page turns off every AI feature, like AI-assisted answers and AI-generated images, by default.
The company said the trend is stronger in the U.S., and that DuckDuckGo continued to gain users over the Memorial Day weekend, when it usually sees a dip in traffic.
DuckDuckGo offers its own AI product called Duck.ai. It’s free and doesn’t require users to make an account but provides access to models, including Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 4 Scout, Mistral’s Small 3 24B, and OpenAI’s GPT-5 mini. All chats are private because DuckDuckGo strips the user’s IP address before requests reach model providers, deletes conversations within 30 days, and prevents chats from being used for training.
“Not only do we respect user choice, but also user privacy,” Weinberg said. “Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is private; we don’t collect search histories or chats and nothing is used for AI training.”
DuckDuckGo also offers Search Assist, which is similar to Google’s AI overviews, and an AI Image Filter that filters out AI-created images from search results.
Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s chief communications and policy officer, said both of those AI features are among the company’s most popular, despite their differing ethos.
“People just want a choice,” Bazbaz said.
TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment.
Re: DDG AI convos “aren’t used for training”.
They can’t be sure of that. The models themselves could be logging prompts and outputs for training or whatever reason. Only question is if they value those logs, though they could just have their LLM curate them to filter out low quality ones, if the space is even an issue.
If there’s no user feedback reaching their servers, there’s limited value to be extracted from the logs.
I’ve defaulted to ddg for like 2 years now. Solid. Good enough. Really what happened is that SEO optomization websites even before the AI craze made Google search so awful that ddg became just as good if not better for me than google
Same here and I recently purchased a degoogled Fairphone 6.
i would love a degoogled phone, but i also lose my wallet fucking everywhere around the house (I swear, it goes in one spot but then it’s time for a clown drum circle and i can’t find my wallet for a week because i cleaned the damn house) so like i have gotten used to some creature comforts recently. you know how it goes.
It’s also the search engine that doesn’t bitch if you use a VPN
Until real Americans take their country back from the corrupt pedophile protecting “administration”, I’ll mostly avoid US search engines altogether.
Obligatory actual direct link (it’s just a common sense subdomain): noai.duckduckgo.com
DDG still features AI enshittification, but at least one can opt-out… For now.
I don’t even care about an ai overview at the top. Give me a search engine that ranks down the sea of blogs that launched a year ago and have 5,000+ articles that are just ai generated bullshit designed to capture as many search queries as possible
Ecosia, ddg, google, brave, etc are all laden with this shit and it clogs up the searches. “How do I do x” and an endless stream of “achieving x is possible. Here’s a bulleted list of the next 12 paragraphs, then a bunch of summarized info from Reddit posts that only answers your question in the most basic obvious way and has no accounting for any kind of edge case or even just non traditional but acceptable use case. And even if you just wanted the basic answer its useless because the LLM fluffed the sentence long answer with 12 pages of meandering nonsense”
Search for an item get a “19 best options for item in MAY 2026”, click, blurb & amazon links!
I don’t even mind people summarizing into they’ve found elsewhere, but like you said it’s the most basic information—it’s the opposite of summarizing, it’s whipping up this lexical froth of bullshit filler around a tiny kernel of a factoid.
Meandering nonsense exactly. Just plausible enough for you to keep reading, and probably impressive to someone who doesn’t know the domain, but as soon as you try to logically put together what you’ve read it falls apart.
The frustrating part is that getting around it sucks. I’m told Kagi has better support for this but from what I’ve read it relies on users downranking the domains, which is a fools errand given the flood of these sites. I’ve also seen people that maintain blocklists for this that work with things like adguard and uBlock but then you still get pages of slop, but all the links just 404 now
My conspiracy is that this is allowed and not dealt with to push people to use LLMs directly, which are quickly becoming the most effective way to search for information online (with the caveat that you either need to have the knowledge to identify errors or be willing to double check the information given for flaws. Also taking like 4-7x the energy to process queries)
Just ignore anything written the last two years basically
I definitely de-emphasize it, but eventually the slop is going to sink down to the lower layers of the internet
Ai is fucking great at SEO. But maybe it’s time for a new system
Yeah it’s hijacked so many of our old (admittedly tenuous) trust systems.
The worst being that a piece of detailed “content” is evidence that a human being cared enough about something to put effort into making it.
For what it’s worth, DDG recognized this immediately.
They dipped their toe in AI search, felt the pushback, and went all-in on putting toggles and immediately accessible opt-outs everywhere. They put a filter for AI images (and I hope they do the same for AI SEO spam).
In other words, they actually leaned in and listened to their own users. Unlike the soulless vampire on a throne Google has become.
While I do appreciate this, their search results aren’t great. I hate to say this, but even with horrible AI forward results, Google still returns better and more relevant results. I’ll still use ddg first but it generally leaves me wanting.
Yeah I tried switching to ddg and ecosia several times and had the same experience, especially for technical searches. I’m trying Kagi right now and it seems better, but haven’t done too many technical ones yet, so we’ll see on that front
brave search also have the option to turn it off ehich is very nice
Brave is a garbage browser
If you change your region to France on Google it doesn’t give you the default AI results.
I’d rather have AI results than to associate myself with the French
The fuck is your problem with the French?
I guess the joke was not obvious after all
It was not. Still isn’t. What was the joke? I’m really in the woosh territory here…
We Europeans usually joke about hating the French. We don’t mean it.
Well, isn’t that a shock. What I want to see is 💯 of web searchers avoiding Google.
DDG isn’t the holy grail people make it out to be; it has contracts with Microsoft and we all know how Microslop likes AI.
No, they’re not, but they are one of the better-known alternatives to Google, and they do advocate privacy. This, in itself, is a good thing and should be promoted.
The problem is that Google’s monopoly on web search is so large that using Google is the de facto standard for the vast majority of people. Getting them to acknowledge that there are alternatives to Google benefits privacy on the internet more than DDG having contracts with MS harms it.
Switching from Google to MS/Bing isnt really much of a privacy win.
Switching from a search engine that heavily tracks you to a search engine that doesn’t is a privacy win.
Think microslop doesn’t track you? Think again.
I’m not sure if I correctly get your point: DDG provides search results based on Bing and has advertisment contracts with MS but DDG in itself doesn’t track you:
From DDGs FAQ:
We partner with many different information sources to deliver DuckDuckGo Search (e.g., Microsoft for ads, Apple for maps, etc.). When you view search results (including ads), your searches cannot be tied back to you, either by us or our partners. How this works technically is we do not store any personal identifiers (e.g., IP address) with your search terms, and we also proxy all requests to partners through us.
Rule of thumb is to not take their word as gospel. All social media also present themselves as being concerned about your privacy when they are anything but.
Search engine ad set-ups include trackers typically.
Okay, I get it. So do you propose that we simply don’t trust any company, or do you especially mistrust DDG? If you specifically mistrust DDG, do you have a good alternative?
If you mistrust companies in general: I get where you’re coming from, but I also think it’s highly impractical to distrust basically everyone on the Internet because you have to use their services at some point.
I wouldn’t use DDG’s Android app, though, because it doesn’t block Microsoft trackers. Now we can debate whether this means the app doesn’t block MS trackers on MS websites or if it allows tracking on its own website (which would contradict the claim I cited above).
DDG is relying on Google to get the results, no?
No. Bing
Not much better tbh. These sort of proxy like search engines, I don’t like
