DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Reactions to Google’s AI Mode

  • Strong split: some find AI Mode genuinely useful and time‑saving, especially for quick “how do I…” or “what is…” questions; others see it as intrusive, lower‑quality, and hard to disable.
  • Several report Gemini / Google AI as more restrictive than other LLMs (e.g., refusing harmless topics), and often factually wrong or shallow.
  • Many dislike that AI overviews are inserted by default at the top of results; some use URL parameters (e.g., udm=14) or browser tricks to avoid them.

Shift Toward DuckDuckGo and Other Alternatives

  • A noticeable subset changed defaults to DuckDuckGo, often specifically to noai.duckduckgo.com or lite.duckduckgo.com to avoid AI overlays.
  • Others already used DDG and only fall back to Google with !g when needed.
  • Some argue DDG results are weaker (especially for non‑English or niche queries) and end up using !g most of the time; others claim DDG is now comparable or better than Google’s increasingly SEO‑heavy results.
  • Kagi, Brave Search, Marginalia, and Bing are mentioned as alternatives; several praise Kagi’s “AI on demand” (question mark or button) rather than by default.

Search Quality, SEO Slop, and AI Summaries

  • Broad frustration with Google’s organic results: more ads, SEO‑spam articles, and CAPTCHAs; useful content pushed down.
  • Some use AI summaries explicitly as a shield against SEO garbage, letting the model read low‑quality pages for them.
  • Others insist AI summaries can’t be trusted without manual verification and miss the old “snippets + links” flow.

Ads, Business Model, and Enshittification

  • Many frame Google as an ad company first; search and now AI are just funnels for ad revenue and data collection.
  • Concerns that AI answers will become stealth ad placements and further cut traffic and income to independent sites.
  • Recurrent theme of “enshittification”: deliberate degradation (more ads, worse UX) once dominance is secured.

Broader AI Sentiment and Control

  • Mixed feelings: heavy personal use of LLMs coexists with distrust of how they’re force‑integrated, trained on user data, and used to shape what information is surfaced.
  • Anger at opt‑out‑only data collection and aggressive, confusing AI rollouts across products.

Interpreting the “28% Increase”

  • Multiple commenters question the statistic: relative growth on a tiny base (DDG <1% share) implies only a very small fraction of Google users actually moved.
  • Some still see it as a meaningful signal of dissatisfaction and a “crack” in Google’s dominance, even if economically insignificant today.