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 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.
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.
There are too many damn apps already imo, but apparently some people like having as many as possible
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%.
Well, in this case it helps to override my default search engine on my phone.
ngl, I never thought about changing the default search engine on Android. That was the last place where I was still using Google.
Installing the DDG app right now 😂
I think DDO has its own Firefox fork.
From Chrome to DDG browser likely. Google also have a website but people still install Chrome for it, the lastest AI thing might be the final straw for people to finally looking for the alternative
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
O_o I had no idea. This is really useful.
Happy to help - feel free to spread the word!
You can also set up the ai-free search, noai.duckduckgo.com, as a custom search engine.
Whoa, that’s great news. Thanks for that!
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.
that is on level that i meanwhile believe 90% of people can’t handle or even understand
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.
I didn’t even know they had an app. Why would I need a separate app for a search engine?
It’s a browser.
Oh I didn’t know they had a browser. Interesting.
It’s good on mobile, but the desktop seems useless because I have Firefox/Waterfox
it’s my default browser on mobile. only after using it did i realize that i rarely need data stored, be it cookies or history. go to a site, read whatever, press the flame button to burn the session. for sites you want to keep you can “fireproof” them as well. ezpz
Not anymore, it’s a slopp-machine.
Was talking about Google search… Lmao
I think they’re talking about DDG, not google
“install” websites, i’ll never understand
We’ve come full-circle. I used to download .html pages so I could browse them while offline. Now websites install themselves so they can browse you while offline.
In capitalist America, the content watches you!
I “love” when the wrong technology is applied.
On the the dawn of the smartphones Mozilla tried to enter the space with an FirefoxOS and the pitch was that every app was just a website just more tightly integrated with the phone. The problem is that all the web stack is wonderfully resource hog and at the time phones were super underpowered running websites were not optimized in a browser that were not as optimized as today. So it was a terrible choice for the time being.
Other good one was Android early days. They choose Java as the default app environment and development. It kinda makes sense to use it if you want the same program to run on different platforms, the problem, again, it runs worst and with the underpowered devices of the time everything was a slog. And they doubled down on the mistake by using a garbage collector that doubled the memory usage of every app. The cherry on top, at least in hindsight is that arm was and still is the de facto Android plataform, greatly disminishing the advantage of using Java/JVM. And today Google enabled apps with native code optimized for specific plataforms, but everyone only care about ARM so of you try to run Android like in an Intel laptop a lot of apps are not compatible.
End of rant.
Hey dude, just wanted to say that I learned a little bit from you today. Thanks for sharing on here.
I remember Apple famously disallowing any kind of “Write Once, Run Anywhere” platform tech at the dawn of iOS, ATVos and iPad OS, quite openly trying to fuck with Adobe’s and Sun’s shit.
But using apps to avoid needing all of the traffic and rendering capabilities for modern websites was key in its early days and I remember even 10 years ago recommending to clients and customers that were stuck with awful internet connections or underpowered devices, to try using the apps instead of the websites for things.
Nowadays, I only want to visit so many corpo resources strictly through a browser and fighting tooth and nail to avoid ever letting their apps on my phones. I would literally fire a bank for not having a functional Web page to do what I need done , especially since I probably can’t be on vanilla android for much longer the way things are going and too many secure apps require Google Play services for their circle of trust.
I like Duckduckgo been using it a while, they have a tor based search page as well which is another thing I like.
Wouldn’t say they are anti-ai but at least you get the option to turn it off.
Wouldn’t say they are anti-ai but at least you get the option to turn it off.
Best you can hope for these days, really.
The phone app I use to turn my lights on and off is now calling itself an “AI life assistant” and has an AI prompt box front and center that I can’t get rid of. But at least I can ignore that and still use the real function. Which, to be clear, is a fucking light switch. I use this app exclusively for turning a single light on or off. It does not need a LLM ‘assistant’ built in. But that’s just what you get these days – it’s shoved into everything.
Apparently I’m the Luddite here for sticking with the light switch on the wall that has always just worked. ;p
I exaggerate slightly, I guess. It turns the light on and off and also changes colors.
It’s definitely possible to do color changing LED lighting without an app. Half of my room is lit that way, and I love it. But it’s more expensive and more complicated to install, so when I went for a second light, I just went with the app-controlled bullshit.
but at least you get the option to turn it off
That’s also an option with google, you know.
Disable my AD blocker… Na I’d rather not read the article
With ublock it opens normally. Also by disabling javascript, which is kinda ironic
Luckily 10 minutes after you posted that, another commenter posted the full article in plain text, in the comments here.
Unfortunately the internet will still enshittify with a speed we cannot yet imagine
I’m reading this within two hours of setting up and playing around with my own local SearXNG instance. I’m glad people are utilizing a more privacy respecting platform, but too bad it’s more about “God! Fuck this AI shit, get it out of my face!” more-so than people taking control of their own privacy.
Don’t get me wrong though, “God! Fuck this AI shit, get it out of my face!” is the appropriate response.
Its not crazy hard to install your own searxng instance. Works pretty well. The problem is that the Internet itself is turning into AI slop.
Dude I don’t even know what that is or what it does and I’m pretty sure most people don’t either. It might be easy but what the heck even is it?
It let’s you have one search website where you have it pull results from all other search engines (that you want) and then it can rank results based on where things rank on the various engines.
Tl;dr self hosted search proxy, with some advanced features
Check out yacy, its not well polished but at least it doesn’t rely on major search engines afaik (p2p)
That’s great but…are people really downloading an app to search? Or are they talking about DDG browser?
AI probably told them it was the easiest way
Shoutout to https://uruky.com/
It’s a paid private search engine.
https://theprivacydad.com/interview-with-the-engineer-of-uruky-a-private-search-engine/
Trying them out right now, so far so good!
I appreciate their comparison to Kagi also notes Kagi’s strengths.
Obligatory actual direct link (it’s just a common sense subdomain): noai.duckduckgo.com
I hate that ddg has “show AI images” on by default
But I like that it has that toggle at least
It’s great it even has a toggle.
Thats depressing. % stats like this always oversell it. There are probably not many people installing duckduckgo so a 30% increase is a small handful of users. I’d expect like 500% if there was actual pushback.
Unfortunatly there will not be an actual pushback, because most people will always prefer convinience above almost anything else.
Even facts.
I know so many people who will use ChatGPT fully knowing it might be wrong. They dont care.
Scary, right?
Or that it’s a supremely scummy and buggy, even compared to other LLM frontends.
I for one don’t install any search engines. I don’t see a point in doing so.
50 million+ installs on Android, so it’s not a tiny number.
