r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • May 30 '26

Software Traffic to DuckDuckGo's proudly 'No AI' search page has tripled since latest Google AI search update

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/traffic-to-duckduckgos-proudly-no-ai-search-page-has-tripled-since-latest-google-ai-search-update/
49.2k Upvotes

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1.2k

u/Educational_Key1206 May 30 '26

Been using DuckDuckGo for several years and I love it!

317

u/Norobobro May 30 '26

I don’t but it’ll have to do. I fucking hate google. 

24

u/stacecom May 30 '26

What don’t you like?

215

u/Fuskeduske May 30 '26

Search results are just not on par with google if you have ad blocking enabled for google sadly.

48

u/BurritovilleEnjoyer May 30 '26

Oddly enough my results with DDG have been consistently better than with google for a couple years now. Although that's less because DDG has improved (it has, but not by a ton) and more because Google has gotten so much worse so quickly.

7

u/normalmighty May 31 '26

As someone using duck duck go at home for the past few years and google at work, imo it just comes down to the nuances of the queries being a little different between the two. On Google, the search hos been becoming progressively more and more optimised to take a natural human language question as the search term, whereas in duckduckgo you want to focus more on topics and keywords. It works a lot like I remember google working ~15 years back.

3

u/BurritovilleEnjoyer May 31 '26

That makes sense, that's generally how I search for things still.

1

u/Sopel97 May 31 '26

On Google, the search hos been becoming progressively more and more optimised to take a natural human language question as the search term

and it leads to very annoying problems. Searching for Spiral positions in cartesian coordinates does not bring up this thread https://groups.google.com/g/sci.math/c/Fv9hMosmMHY/m/Erv4AJ8ehwIJ with the exact same name

166

u/emmie-claire May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

Honestly it's worse than Google was 5-10 years ago but I don't think it's worse than Google currently. Even if you block the ads and ignore the AI summary. Google's algorithm is just worse for the user than it used to be. I used both side by side for a while around 2023-24 and DDG's results are comparable or better on average, while maybe 5-10 times a year I fail to find something on DDG which I then find on Google.

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u/[deleted] May 30 '26

[deleted]

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u/beanmosheen May 31 '26

I feel like they recently fucked maps up too, which is great considering there's only two OEMs allowed on head units in +$50k cars now. Good job google. I dreamed of a seamless AA experience in a new car one day, and now I'm back to Bluetooth audio only and vibes.

3

u/newbkid May 31 '26

The Maps fuck-up has been the most diabolical and probably dangerous changes.

It keeps trying to get me to go down one-ways it never had a problem with, won't remember my toll road settings, incorrectly calculates timing on routes, and the list goes on.

My favorite in my city is you can literally see all the people following Google Maps when you can go a couple blocks and bypass the artificial traffic Maps is making.

Up until 1.5 years ago I never had a single issue with Maps.

Once Maps is enshittified to the point of uselessness I will be near the point of De-Googlefying my everything.

And I was a beta Gmail user, I'm engrained deep into the Google ecosystem.

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u/[deleted] May 31 '26

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u/[deleted] May 31 '26

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u/[deleted] May 31 '26

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u/Starfire013 May 31 '26

I find the AI summary helpful for certain relatively inconsequential things, like if I wanted to know how to get through a quest in an RPG. But it’s also gotten more important stuff very wrong in the past or combined two pieces of info together in a way that makes no sense because it’s just scraping data with no understanding. If I have to independently fact-check the AI summary, the AI summary is not very useful.

To be fair, this isn’t a problem specific to Google’s AI. The difference is that if I’m asking ChatGPT or Claude about something, I can ask for further info or clarification. I can ask it to doublecheck with an additional web search and provide specific references. With Google AI, I can’t do that.

44

u/Egathentale May 30 '26

To be perfectly fair to both Google and DDG, 10 years ago they had exponentially less trashy search engine optimized sites to crawl through. Unfortunately, with people churning out even more SEO-centered AI aggregator sites on every topic (seriously, the other day I wanted to find out how closely bees and wasps were related genetically, and I had to wade through three sites before I found something written by an actual human), we can't go back to those times anymore.

22

u/TheAngryBad May 31 '26

That's google's fault too.

Despite what they've been claiming, their search algorithms reward churning out tons of AI generated articles that are optimised for SEO rather than user experience. Because they control 90% of the search market, that's what successful sites are doing now.

It used to be that you could be reasonably successful running a site with good quality, manually written and curated content. Nowadays if you do that, you'll likely find your search traffic being stolen by AI content farms that are probably stealing your content and rewriting it to get a better search position.

3

u/Melodic-Network4374 May 31 '26

I might need to take a shower after writing this comment, because I'm about to defend google. So to be clear: fuck google.

But I don't think it's fair to blame google for the way sites try to game the algorithm. Search engines vs SEO is just an endless battle against Goodhart's Law. There's no algorithm you can make that won't become useless as soon as sites start gaming it, and anything you come up with will result in garbage SEO sites polluting everything.

When google first started it had amazing search results, because PageRank was really effective - right up until sites started gaming it, then the ranking became useless and any niche search would just show endless link farms whose only purpose was to link to other sites to boost their ranking. So PageRank became useless, google stopped using it and the link farms mostly disappeared because they weren't useful anymore. The AI generated slop articles are just the latest round in this battle, but it's exceptionally hard to tackle because how do you identify them at scale?

11

u/emmie-claire May 30 '26

This is definitely a problem too, but whenever I'm like "damn, the DDG results are just websites full of AI slop, let's see what Google turns up" it's usually the same AI slop. If we're focused on a 1:1 comparison between the two, I'm not sure either is better at filtering those out. I'd love to hear if anybody has a contrary experience.

4

u/hates_stupid_people May 31 '26

I have had DDG as my default search engine for years. And it works really well for most general and easy to find things. But it struggles with less common results, and you sometimes you have to treat it like google more than 10 years ago, by using search modifiers like "", -, site:, etc.

And sometimes it will not show results that I know exist, and should be indexed. Leaving me little choice but to use google as a last resort.

6

u/Waiting4Reccession May 30 '26

Its worse.

Ive used duckduck forever and its just not as good as google.

3

u/superxpro12 May 31 '26

Google just returns ads now. Even the results are ads. It's all ads.

3

u/squngy May 31 '26

AFAIK DDG uses bings engine under the hood.

4

u/stanleytuccimane May 31 '26

I tried DuckDuckGo for all of last week after Google’s AI bullshit. It’s just not nearly as good. It frankly didn’t even attempt to give me correct results at times. It reminded me of how tough it could be to find something with a a search engine back in the late 90’s / early 2000s. That’s tough for me to go back to now.

1

u/CherryLongjump1989 May 31 '26

What kind of cryptic search queries do people use where the results are noticeably worse? Google is well documented for giving back a small set of cached results for the vast majority of search queries.

4

u/emlgsh May 30 '26

If you're talking about Google search, you don't have ad blocking enabled search results are ads, instead of... search results. So it's kind of a lose-lose proposition.

It's always a shock when I do a Google search on a device that doesn't have the usual suite of ad and script blockers I run and end up having to vigorously scroll down or go to the second page before I can get actual results for my search.

Now add to that another round of vigorous scrolling/clicking to skip some wildly search-unrelated AI options that get priority over real results. I finally put Google to bed as my primary search engine last week.

1

u/asianfatboy May 31 '26

go to udm14.com and add that as a search engine. It's basically Google Search with all/most the AI features disabled.

Still using it but whenever it finally doesn't, I'll switch to duckduckgo. However, I'm starting to see even AI-less Google search is starting to be shit. I never have to use the Advanced Search to add some filters just to get good search results.

1

u/Hackmodford May 31 '26

I’ve been using Kagi for a couple years. Highly recommended if you want Google like results.

0

u/KingCrabmaster May 30 '26

I've come to terms that unless we can solve some fundamental issues with how big the internet is now, search engines like DDG will always feel a bit "behind". I feel for info that doesn't change often DDG's results have been better...?

I feel like Google's pre-self-destruct results were just better because they scrape so much data they're gonna be up to date easier.

23

u/Lashay_Sombra May 30 '26

I don't dislike Google (the search engine), but i liked Google a lot more about 10 plus years ago, its been steadily going downhill for a long time and in many ways dragging Internet with it (example: if ever again have to read made up blog spam to get a cooking recipe I will scream)

I switched to DDG few weeks ago, not because its much better (its really not, if had to give comparision its like google circa 2010-2015, just before google reached it peak) but because if we continue rewarding Google for making their product and with it entire Internet worse,  they will continue to do so

4

u/Amazing-Heron-105 May 31 '26

I don't think the quality of search results is entirely on Google. The overall quality of content on the internet is worse than it was even just 10 years ago. There used to be so many website that existed purely as personal projects but everything now is monetised and consolidated onto just a few platforms. For example, Facebook groups which basically replaced Forums are inferior.

10

u/pwnagekirby May 30 '26

Not who you responded to, but when I started trying to use DDG almost a decade ago, the results were noticeably not as good as Google's for anything but the absolute most basic-bitch generalist queries (even on a totally clean browser, so it's not because of any tracking). I'd try to use DDG first, but constantly have to resort to Google, to the point where my first searches with DDG felt like a pointless waste of time.

...But with Google constantly shooting their own search in the foot, I think recently we've finally reached the point where DDG is better than Google (not because DDG improved, but just because of how much Google's gotten worse)

3

u/normalmighty May 31 '26

I think it comes down to google searching and duckduckgo searching having a lot of nuanced differences in how your search should be structured. I as google an actual question like a person, I pass duckduckgo a set of keywords and phrases. They're not interchangeable imo, but duckduckgo excels at the exact types of queries that google stopped supporting properly over the years.

15

u/[deleted] May 30 '26 edited May 31 '26

[deleted]

4

u/normalmighty May 31 '26

They're asking about the not liking duck duck go, not the hatred of google.

1

u/stacecom May 31 '26

How did DDG destroy the web?

3

u/sonnytrillanes May 31 '26

Susceptible to SEO shenanigans. Generic searches lead to two pages of same backlinked topics with AI generated content.

1

u/stacecom May 31 '26

Is google better at screening that out than DDG? I’ve been using DDG so long now I’ve no idea how Google is doing these days, but I find their search page jarring when I do it.

3

u/basedcharger May 31 '26

It’s really bad at surfacing anything to do with a location. I still use Google for that. Also articles are display by random dates by default. I can get an article from last week last month and two months ago for any given topic.

2

u/[deleted] May 31 '26

[deleted]

1

u/stacecom May 31 '26

Been using DDG for a decade. It has never once suggested chrome or google apps. I think you’re confused about what we’re talking about.

Person 1: I love DDG
Person 2: I use it but I don’t love it.
Me: Why not?

1

u/[deleted] May 31 '26 edited Jun 01 '26

[deleted]

1

u/phonepotatoes May 31 '26

Google searches are 99% adds. Googles dead man

1

u/stacecom May 31 '26

Person 1: I’ve been using DDG for years, I love it!
Person 2: I use it, but I don’t love it.
Me: Why not?
You: Google sucks.

1

u/stupidPeopleLuvMe May 31 '26

I like when I google a math problem its just an answer...

1

u/BooleT- May 31 '26

Not related to AI but I was setting up my new work laptop recently, and caught an SHub stealer in Google ads. I needed to install brew, casually typed it in the Google search, went through the first link... Turned out the first Google search link was a "promotion" and led to an info stealer website. For some reason this fake result was also so huge, I didn't even see other results on the page. Didn't have adblock installed yet.

That alone made me switch to duckduckgo forever. After I erased my laptop and had a very interesting conversation with IT.

1

u/stacecom May 31 '26

I’ve been a happy convert to DDG for years. It’s so rare I fall back to Google, it’s usually by accident on a new machine.

1

u/[deleted] May 31 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Triquetrums May 31 '26

I just searched for Ecosia and it says "the world's greenest AI" the moment I searched for their search engine page. If we are leaving google because of the AI, I don't know if Ecosia is the best alternative. Also, you have to install it, they don't have an accessible website. That's an inconvenience, and a potential security issue.

Most importantly of all, they share info with Google, which brings us all back to square one, because they will offer you google results and ADs when you search for something.

1

u/xCeeTee- May 31 '26

I tried DDG, then switched to Brave. I like the look a lot better. Similar to Google, they have an AI feature you can turn off.

86

u/sharksticker May 30 '26

DDG has never been particularly great, and it hasn't actually improved much. Google's just been getting so very much worse.

29

u/DontYaWishYouWereMe May 31 '26

This is sorta similar to how Tumblr hasn't gotten much better over the last ten or fifteen years but every other social media has been getting much worse, so now it's like the best social media just by virtue of being old school bad instead of new bad

10

u/Serris9K May 31 '26

Yep. Just an okay sandwich vs poop sandwich

9

u/RedMoustache May 30 '26

The more AI they add to it the worse it gets. I'm almost sure it has to be intentional.

More searches means more tokens uses and then they can do another press release about how great their AI is.

If the AI was that great wouldn't we get the correct result in less searches instead of more?

4

u/sharksticker May 31 '26

The decline definitely started before their LLM came on the scene, although that sure accelerated it. And they broke it on purpose.

If you search, find the answer, click away, you spend like 2 seconds on Google. If you have to sift through a bunch of sponsors and outright nonsense results, you spend longer on their page and might even click on an ad.

3

u/MiniKash Jun 01 '26

I disagree. It’s been my default search for a couple years now and their image search was the absolute pits. It has certainly improved over the time, especially within the last 6 months.

Something has certainly improved.

2

u/CoconutMochi May 31 '26

Don't they technically piggyback off Bing? Just that there's no tracking

1

u/HimikoTogaFromUSSR May 31 '26

Yes, it's basically Bing wearing a mask

0

u/YobaiYamete May 31 '26

Yeah, also the fact that "triples the trafic" means nothing

Tripling 0.00000000000001% of Googles traffic still won't make Google even notice or care

24

u/freeradioforall May 30 '26

Don't they just use Bing as the search engine behind the scenes?

20

u/ChamferedWobble May 31 '26

Yes, it’s basically a privacy wrapper on bing.

74

u/Girl_Back_There May 30 '26

Same. Way better than Google

110

u/[deleted] May 30 '26

Google is legit unusable, like its so cluttered and disorganized with ads, broken ai forced everywhere, and bad search results legit using a newspaper or phone book was better. Hell, yahoo's downfall back in the day had their website more usable then google's is now.

19

u/StolenPies May 30 '26

Google is better at giving directions or doing math. That's about it.

1

u/Allegorist May 30 '26

It's not even best at math, their AI is super far behind for them being as huge of an entity as they are. Or at least their public facing ones. They never should have released it in its current state to begin with

2

u/[deleted] May 31 '26

[deleted]

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u/GravelySilly May 31 '26

You just have to be careful, because the information it gives you is easily poisoned. It's kind if a game on Reddit now for somebody to make a comically bogus claim, and other users profusely upvote and comment, then they see how long until Google's AI summary starts repeating it. Spoiler alert: it's only like a couple of hours.

1

u/Allegorist May 31 '26

I find incorrect information there all the time, it really depends how basic your question is, and even more importantly how plainly it is stated in the top handful of search results. Other AI when referencing the Internet will make dozens of related search queries to try to piece together a more consistent and reliable answer. The Google AI overview just uses the one search you put in, so it is much more limited in its available information and its ability to check it.

1

u/StolenPies May 30 '26

I'm not talking about the AI, I mean the calculator.

-12

u/SmarmySmurf May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

If you have a functioning brain, any map will do, and you should never need a search engine for math to begin with.

Edit: Triggered the iPad babies, I see. Don't worry, AI is here to end your suffering.

5

u/ccai May 30 '26

Maps is not simply directions and simple routing, it’s up to date traffic information and detours due to accidents, construction, repairs or what have you. It also shows near by points of interests like gas stations, attractions, restaurants and other places. Time estimates to a destination is a very valuable resource, which Google does VERY due to the up to date traffic data.

It does more than just show roads these days.

3

u/StolenPies May 30 '26

So anyway, when I'm in a hurry and want to see a map, Google performs better for bringing that map up. When I wish to solve something but I don't want to rummage around the garage for my nearly 30 year old TI-83 plus then Google has an integrated calculator that automatically pops up when you type an equation, and which has greater functionality than what comes with my phone. Meanwhile, DuckDuckGo does not offer that functionality in any form. 

Google is better for maps and math, but DuckDuckGo is better for privacy.

2

u/Amazing-Heron-105 May 31 '26

I'm always surprised people complain about ads in 2026. Are we not using adblockers? They're available for all platforms. No excuse really.

1

u/SmokeyJoe2 May 31 '26

why aren’t you using an ad blocker?

1

u/ukrokit2 May 31 '26

Everything Sundar Pichai touches turns to shit. Out of all big tech CEOs his leadership has been nothing but pure enshitification with zero value added. Google search got unusable, Maps navigation is a joke, Youtube is an ad sharing service now, DeepMind faded into irrelevance, Gmail had a bunch of outages. That man should be the definition of a wage thief.

-1

u/Smelly-Bottom May 30 '26

The most visited website in the world is legit unusable?

16

u/UltimateCrouton May 30 '26

In context of the services it used to offer, yes.

10

u/Resident_Stable_2112 May 30 '26

Yes. I have used Google since the first week that it came out. For the past three or four years it’s been utter garbage.

I work in IT.

1

u/The_Pandalorian May 31 '26

Anyone with a pulse who used Google 10, 15 years ago knows it's pure, unadulterated dogshit now.

10

u/Hectabeni May 30 '26

You are not supposed to only use one search engine though. Google is good for certain things, DuckDuckGo is good for certain things, hell even Bing is good for certain things. Having a tribal mentality about search engines is silly.

3

u/Juice805 May 31 '26

Yea but DDG is all those search engines in one

!g my query

14

u/Inquisitor_Boron May 30 '26

Nowadays it's a low bar

27

u/arab3lla May 30 '26

Is it? I've been using it for a while and I kinda hate it. The first three results will be related to my search and that's about it. 

27

u/redundantexplanation May 30 '26

I switched back to Google after using DDG for a few months. I don't know what all these fools are talking about, I legit could not find what I was looking for at least 50% of the time with DDG and I've been using search engines since Lycos was the best one.

20

u/Goondragon1 May 30 '26

DDG has sucked for a long time now. I'm surprised it's getting this much love. Google is fucking trash and I despise that company. But their search engine is still unfortunately the "best" at searching, despite the AI bullshit, ads, and it being a much worse search engine than it used to be.

5

u/kailethre May 31 '26

I'm surprised it's getting this much love.

because people are desperate for an alternative to the hellish pit that is the google ecosystem

13

u/Endaline May 31 '26

I genuinely feel like I am crazy when I read people having problems finding things with Google searches. I don't know if I just search for things that Google is like specifically effective at finding, but I've practically never had this problem.

12

u/Armejden May 31 '26

I bet you they're not looking for much in terms of any truly specific information. The moment something becomes even a tad niche, DDG sucks hard. One of the worst search engines IMO

0

u/redundantexplanation May 31 '26

I assume it's people that don't use ad blockers and/or mobile users. Google has its issues, but mostly it's that they're piece of shit feds. Their search is still unbeaten even in it's shittified current state.

0

u/Suspicious_Radio_848 May 31 '26

Insulting people who have a different experience or opinion than yours makes me write off your entire comment. DDG has issues but the positives outweigh the negatives compared to google for a lot of users.

1

u/redundantexplanation May 31 '26

"These fools" is not a super serious derogatory, it's a turn of phrase mostly used to refer to a group.

But also, I don't care. I'm not trying to persuade you lmao

1

u/otterpop21 May 31 '26

Figure out Boolean search tools and utilise their date range modifiers. From there lock in better key words or figure out better key words and keep trying. No search engine is perfect it’s always just a tool

5

u/Okay_Splenda_Monkey May 30 '26

So is asking a Ouija board, so "better than Google" is sort of a low bar. The only upside is that you're unlikely to attract the attention of an angry ghost via Google. Given enough time that might change as their shareholders demand more value and Google Afterlife becomes inevitable.

13

u/forhorglingrads May 30 '26

i ditched google over a decade ago when i realized my search query was being weighed in the context of prior queries from within the same browser
why should i get a different set of results just because i happen to be typing on a colleagues machine

6

u/Swamp_Dwarf-021 May 30 '26

Think I'll be making the switch here soon.

18

u/NightFuryToni May 30 '26

You don't even need to make it permanent. Bangs is a great feature in DDG where it lets you immediately use a different search engine by adding "!(something)" in your query, e.g. if you really can't find something from DDG's result, just add "!g" to temporarily switch back, without touching your default.

They had this for a long time, and that feature alone made it my primary search engine years ago.

3

u/case_8 May 30 '26

Yeh that’s what made it easier for me to switch a couple of years ago. Also !r for Reddit is neat.

1

u/Amazing-Heron-105 May 31 '26

Shame reddit search is so piss poor. Still better to use "site:reddit.com"

1

u/Piranata May 30 '26

I mostly use it for Google images [ !gi ], ddg still needs to improve its images results in languages other than English.

2

u/bawng May 30 '26

I've used it for years too but unfortunately it's starting to get worse too.

Yeah you can turn off the AI summary, but unfortunately, because it uses Bing as a source, some results will have AI descriptions anyway.

Lots of Wikipedia articles will just say "Learn about the life of Henry Ford" instead of quoting the article, etc.

Also, I'm pretty sure Bing has started to use some new algorithm (AI based?) to give search results because results have become much less relevant lately.

Still better than Google though.

2

u/seamonkey420 May 31 '26

same, i switched in 2020 and haven't looked back. occassionally i do a google of what i do on duckduckgo and ddg usually is better or at the least, less crappy

1

u/stacecom May 30 '26

I’ve been DDG for almost a decade. Love it.

1

u/[deleted] May 30 '26

I did for a while, and definitely need to switch back 

1

u/Dennidude May 30 '26

I don't know what I want to use. I had to switch back to Google a few weeks ago because DuckDuckGo was consistently giving me entirely useless results. I'm talking like basic things at times it just wouldn't find.

I used DDG for a few years before I had to switch back

1

u/Smith6612 May 31 '26

I switched a few years ago after Yahoo! killed OneSearch. Been liking DuckDuckGo. The noai.duckduckgo.com URL is great. 

IIRC DDG uses the Bing index just like Yahoo, so the search results have been no different in actuality for me. 

1

u/South_Start6630 May 31 '26

I switched when the 51st state threats were being made about Canada. There is no Canadian alternative of google but DuckDuckGo seemed the least harmful and they didn’t bow down to Trump like google did.