Technology

...Installs?

Do they know there's a website?

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.

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.

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.

"install" websites, i'll never understand

I didn't even know they had an app. Why would I need a separate app for a search engine?

I can't find anything I'm looking for on Google anymore. It's not a search engine, it's just ads.

Disable my AD blocker.... Na I'd rather not read the article

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

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.

I just wish they had their own web crawler instead of relying on Microsoft's

Unfortunately the internet will still enshittify with a speed we cannot yet imagine

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.

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.

My friend just told me ddg is now better than google search

DDG still features AI enshittification, but at least one can opt-out... For now.

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.

I hate that ddg has "show AI images" on by default

'just duckduckgo it'

Until real Americans take their country back from the corrupt pedophile protecting "administration", I'll mostly avoid US search engines altogether.

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”

Ironically, duck.ai is also the only AI provider I use because on top of having multiple models available, it has no login requirement so I just ask whatever stupid question and be on my way.