1016
DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search
(techcrunch.com)
this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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The amount of absolutely undue shit ddg got for innovating on par with literally every other search engine is ridiculous.
Kagi introduced the same AI search and got exactly zero shit.
Assuming this is about duck.ai, I didn't know they got shit for it. People I've talked to generally enjoy having that option available. It's free and about as private as you can get with the current LLM chatbots, unless you self host one yourself.
At least until Confer gets off the ground. Once that happens, I'm hoping DDG switches to a similar model
https://confer.to/blog/2026/01/private-inference/
I don't keep up with the drama. I use Kagi and disabled the AI. Simple as that. Does DDG make it easy to disable?
Yes a simple one time settings toggle
or https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
the search box on that page can be added to the browser's search engine choices.. in firefox, right click it and 'add search engine'
I've seen Kagi get plenty of shit online for their AI features.
I consider the people paying to use Kagi, which simply uses Bing indexers included in its search results because there is no way in hell any company can have the infrastructure/resources/money to index the entire internet for the last 30 years other than Google and Microsoft, in the same boat of people who purchased NFT tokens of an image.
I don’t know what to tell you other than they offer the best search results and AI in the game
I don't know man, I'm just paying for a service that works better than the mainstream free alternatives.
...I really should have sold my NFTs earlier, though.
That's a bit of a stretch?
People who pay for Kagi likely tried the trial and found the results to be far enough better than google/microslop that they are willing to pay for the ongoing service. Or they want to support a business model that isn't based around the advertising industry, so that someday Kagi can realistically compete with the incumbents. I don't need to search for things often enough to justify the cost, but I know people who use it for work and consider it to be worth the cost.
Meanwhile people who bought NFTs thought that they could sell a copy of a digital image for lots of money.
They don't track you, but you just need to be logged in to make your searches and just trust them not to collect data
My NFTs will be worth something one day! /S
Does Bing even have an API anymore? I thought they mainly use Brave and Yandex now and some other smaller ones