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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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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/bangsWhy... do you need to go through DDG for this? You can just set those custom search engines yourself in the browser without routing through DDG. They let you put any link (with
%sin place of the query's location in the URL) and almost any keybinding. I havewset to attempt to pull up the direct Wikipedia article on the query,cfor Google Contacts,mfor Google Maps (ugh, I've gotta figure out a way outta these Google snares...), etc.This 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.
Is the search engine open source? Is it self-hostable? If the a answer to both questions, especially the first is no, then it can be easly ignored tbh, and Kagi is also paid so it's really a bad suggestion (unless you mention it), people ain't gonna switch from free to paid that easly.
I have to pay someone and then hope that they don't sell my data? Hell nah;
Before you say anything releated to DDG: no, i am not saying you should choose DDG, that it's the better decision, the next best search engine, what i said is unreleated to DDG specifically
Well, I think its different for different users, with different economy and different motivations.
Kagi has 70000 paying members, enough to be profitable without any ads or tracking. Since the results are literally Googles results but without ads, AI results or tracking, it's worth paying for for some people who can.
Ive been a paying member since 2023 and I feel good about supporting alternatives to Google with some lunch money. :)
But we are all different. When I was a teenager I wouldn't have payed for this. Had no money and wanted my money for other things.