From my experience the Google AI mode is more restrictive on what it will let you search for and the content it produces.
I personally have had to use DuckDuckGo to search for things that Gemini finds to be against its instructions to answer.
And I'm not talking about things that are NSFW, but some things that Gemini just doesn't want to discuss.
That's kinda Gemini's problem in general, it just is overly restrictive and doesn't like to talk about anything things that Claude will freely talk about and push against and discuss with you.
rvnx•May 27, 2026
You are absolutely right, DuckDuckGo is better for porn than Google, but if you want even better results you can use Yandex.
For other things, Grok is quite fast — Perplexity too
John7878781•May 27, 2026
AI mode isn't that terrible.
jeffbee•May 27, 2026
AI summary isn't bad at all, but people don't understand it and Google hasn't explained it very well. It is just RAG. It is a summarization of the documents that are on the first page of the SERP. People think it is answering their question independently, but that's not what it does. It takes the docs that are top ranked from web search and digests them.
The corresponding "AI overview" feature of Gmail is amazing. It digests the messages that match your search. Because it is using your own docs, the output is way better. Or, at least, mine is. Maybe your inbox is full of lies but mine isn't.
josefritzishere•May 27, 2026
People understand it. They dislike it. Users want what they want. When Software companies purport to know better... they do themselves and their customers a disservice.
al_borland•May 27, 2026
My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they hate AI being pushed so hard. One was just messaging me this morning about alternatives to Google search and maps. He ended up downloading DuckDuckGo.
If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
dylan604•May 27, 2026
Search is not the golden goose. Ads are. If search was the golden goose, they wouldn't be trying so hard to replace it with AI.
Just because Google used to do search as their main point of business does not mean that holds true today. Holding on to the false premise will only add to your confusion about their decisions.
jeffwask•May 27, 2026
They only dominate Ads because they dominate search if everyone leaves Search the ad business grinds to a halt as well. These are the ying and yang of Google.
dylan604•May 27, 2026
Kind of. They dominate ads because the dominated search when they bought the successful ads company. By that point in time, they already had your profile built, and the further use of search just continues to enhance that profile. But now that ads has its own persistent tracking that dependence on search is not as strong as it used to be
jeffwask•May 27, 2026
People have reported a decrease in ROI from spending on Google ads already when they no longer control all the eyes and where you rank in what those eyes see when they search, that ROI will drop even more. People will stop paying for Google ads when the ROI is higher on other platforms.
Couple that with the fact that a lot of folks have moved their search to GPT or Claude once those platforms start taking in ad money... that budget will come from somewhere and that's likely existing Google ad buy dollars shifting.
ethmarks•May 27, 2026
> when they bought the successful ads company
Could you elaborate on this? What ad company did Google buy?
TheGrassyKnoll•May 27, 2026
DoubleClick (2008, according to Wikipedia)
svth•May 27, 2026
doubleclick.net, about 20 years ago.
al_borland•May 27, 2026
Ads in Search make up a significant percentage of their revenue. It is also the gateway that gets people into the Google ecosystem.
Ads make the money, but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there. It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.
I’m always surprised by how much people are still searching for stuff as we’ve moved from the open web to various platforms (Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, etc), but every time I see Google’s revenue breakdown I’m shocked by just how important Search still is to their business.
This is from 2024, but shows Search accounting for nearly 57% of revenue. Yes, this is made possible by the AdWords business, but without Search, that 57% goes away, unless that traffic goes to a 3rd party that is also using AdWords and Google were to make the same from 3rd party ads as 1st party. I find that doubtful.
> It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.
Which is kind of the scary hazard for Google. They made people notice search by their announcements. They drew attention to the thing people took for granted as just how things work. People suddenly have a reason to look critically at it. Google has to hope to god the attention they receive back is actually positive.
godelski•May 28, 2026
> but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there.
And let's not forget, these are the same people that when searching for "eBay" will put an ad at the top of the results, linking to eBay, and then place eBay as the top search result.
I've found it hilarious that every single search engine does the same thing. You can do it even in Apple's App Store too. (Not seeing the scam I'm talking about? Search a few more times, it'll hit) How does anyone see this as anything but a scam? User clicks the ad? Get paid. User clicks the search result? No pay. Either way, the user gets the same experience. But why the fuck should any company pay for an ad when the user explicitly searched for their product? It's metric hacking. I mean what's their next move? Down rank the explicit result? When making more money requires degrading the product you know we've fucked up
manwe150•May 28, 2026
Not sure this is better, but if they don’t pay, most of the first page will instead point to random unrelated competitors and the search result will become visually harder to find. It is basically legalized mafia tactics (“you’ve got a nice business, shame if something were to happen to it if you don’t pay up”) since supposedly you could pay someone else to SEO the site and achieve the same result without just buying ads
godelski•May 28, 2026
You're exactly right that this is mafia tactics. Clearly people are buying into it to
It would be a shame if someone else got the top result
>> When making more money requires degrading the product you know we've fucked up
BetterThanSober•May 28, 2026
It’s basically a guaranteed way to get your term into the first rank.
When people run a simple keyword search without intending to visit the site itself, for example when eBay is caught in a scandal and you’re curious, you type “eBay” expecting a news link somewhere on the first page.
That and mafia-esque protection money basically
1718627440•May 28, 2026
A lot of big tech behaviour, is very much like mafia behaviour. I always use that description, when people asks me what cloudflare does or how the spam network works. They sell both the problem and the solution and the most unfilterable spam always comes from those aggressively filtering legitimate stuff out (Gmail, Outlook).
monkpit•May 28, 2026
This is not done by the search engine - eBay purposely bids to be the top ad for the search term “eBay”. It’s called cannibalization. They’re more willing to pay for the impression and potential click through than they are willing to give up the ad space to a competitor.
thaumasiotes•May 28, 2026
See my comment sidethread. It's nice when the facts you assert to support your position are, you know, true.
monkpit•May 28, 2026
eBay was an example from the parent, insert whatever brand you want. It’s still called cannibalization and it’s something companies have stopped doing because they don’t see great results
thaumasiotes•May 28, 2026
> And let's not forget, these are the same people that when searching for "eBay" will put an ad at the top of the results, linking to eBay, and then place eBay as the top search result.
Do you see an ad when you search for ebay? I don't.
eBay stopped paying for placement on the term "ebay" more than a decade ago, and I believe the executive who made that call got a bonus. It's possible of course that they changed their mind later, but since there still isn't an ad on the term today, I suspect they didn't.
(Methodology: I opened Microsoft Edge, where I have no addons or adblocking or anything installed, went to google.com, and searched for "ebay". There are no ads in the results panel. There is a sidebar with some non-sponsored information provided; below that sidebar is a section saying "people also search for" that mentions Etsy, Shopify, Poshmark, and Mercari. That section isn't sponsored either.
As a point of comparison, I also searched for "mortgage loans". (Same window, new tab, google.com.) On that search, there is no informational sidebar, and the results panel begins with a section called "Sponsored Results" which occupies the entire vertical extent of the browser window. (And consists of all of four links, with blurbs.) Below the sponsored results is the AI overview, and below that are the genuine results.)
godelski•May 28, 2026
I don't on that exact search but I do see it when I try this in the iPhone App Store. I do also see it on my Android when searching the Playstore.
It was an example. You're getting lost in the weeds. Similar to this saying BuT sOmEoNe ElSe WiLl GeT tHe ToP sPoT
sznio•May 28, 2026
>But why the fuck should any company pay for an ad when the user explicitly searched for their product?
If you don't buy out the top-place for the query, someone else will. In a better case a competitor - imagine Facebook Marketplace being the top result for "ebay". In the worst - a phishing site. The latter happens quite often for software searches.
ThunderSizzle•May 28, 2026
Right, but that's because Google permits that. OP is saying Google should simply stop permitting advertising over the real answer.
tardedmeme•May 28, 2026
Why would Google give themselves less money?
fsflover•May 28, 2026
It should be illegal to mislead the users like this. The search terms weren't generic and didn't match anything.
godelski•May 28, 2026
Let me repeat myself
>>>> When making more money requires degrading the product you know we've fucked up
samsari•May 28, 2026
> ads in search
Right, but you know what's even more effective than ads in search? Biased (towards paying customers) information in LLM output.
autoexec•May 27, 2026
The main reason Google loved search was because it was the primary way they got your personal info. Now Chrome gives Googles your entire browsing history, Gmail lets them read your email, youtube tells them what you're interested in, android gives google your entire life offline and suddenly the only thing google search is good for is as just one more website pushing google ads.
AI is going to be great at pushing ads. Plus AI trains you to give google even more control. Instead of just presenting you with a list of websites offering different perspectives and opinions on something, Google can just tell you what they want you to know/think (or not tell you anything they'd rather you not know/think about). The more you get used to treating google like an oracle instead of a librarian the easier it will be to manipulate you.
nonethewiser•May 27, 2026
This is just wrong. They are working AI into search so that AI does not cannablize search. Search goes hand-in-hand with ads.
tayo42•May 27, 2026
There's a no ads in the Ai result though. And even if they add there isn't space for like 4 or 5 ad results like some searches can return. Some Google searches I have to scroll a whole screen away before I see a real result.
bradley13•May 28, 2026
This. Google wants to sell advertising. If they can embed advertising into AI and make more money, they will.
You ask AI for a product recommendation. It says "Buy X from Acme". Is that paid product placement? Who knows?
RegW•May 28, 2026
May be search is not the golden goose, perhaps more the carrot that brings the user into range of the shitty stick of ads and data leeching.
I'm a bit afraid that although AI is being presented as part of the carrot, it may actually be a shittier stick.
patates•May 27, 2026
> My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they hate AI being pushed so hard.
My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they have fear of missing out on AI :(
thewebguyd•May 27, 2026
> because they have fear of missing out on AI
That's been my experience too, both with friends and coworkers.
It would seem that the negative sentiment around AI is largely an internet phenomenon. I've yet to run into a hardcore "AI skeptic" irl. People seem either neutral, or enthusiastic about it.
pesus•May 27, 2026
Meanwhile I've never run into anyone who actually likes AI in any form (except for my boss). Most people who dislike it aren't bringing it up at random. I'm sure it has to do with the circles you interact with and their demographics.
andersonpico•May 27, 2026
I've yet to meet anyone outside that likes AI except for manager or when people are pretending for their bosses at work. It became a survival tactic.
nonethewiser•May 27, 2026
Every single software engineer I know uses it pretty heavily.
tayo42•May 27, 2026
Becasue they like it? Or becasue it happens to better then alternative tools we had?
2muchcoffeeman•May 28, 2026
The truth is always in between the extremes.
I use AI a lot. But I’m specifically looking for ways it actually ads value.
marcosdumay•May 27, 2026
I know developers that like it. Not in a hyped way like bosses do, but they do like it.
(I don't know anybody that is actually more productive because of it, but I know people that consistently use it successfully in small tasks.)
I also know people afraid it will make all code worse and their jobs a nightmare. It's harder to find those people because they don't say it out loud, but there are plenty who think this way.
marcus_holmes•May 28, 2026
I am way more productive at developing stuff with AI.
I know it's only anecdata, but it's one data point.
I'm a tech startup co-founder able to avoid all the bullshit around it and just build stuff. My favourite part is that I can go through the planning part, get a decent plan for the build together, and then go do something else while the LLM builds it. It also really helps with maker/manager time because the LLM is keeping the context, not me, so if I'm interrupted I don't lose track of everything and have to reload context.
DiogenesKynikos•May 28, 2026
Most people I meet in everyday life think AI is incredibly useful and use it all the time. I have run into a few people in real life who vehemently oppose it, and many more online, but out in the world, they appear to be a minority.
jve•May 28, 2026
My brother with no programming experience took some AI courses and automated adding products to his ecommerce site from his suppliers. Fetches images, converts them, categorizes, adds descriptions/specs in multiple languages translated via DeepL API, calculates prices.
He also tries to troubleshoot/debug stuff without calling me... and just asking me to choose right path offered by AI. I love it :) Because I usually make people wait and don't have much time outside my business hours to do additional tech stuff.
simmerup•May 28, 2026
And the customer of his site gets a bunch of AI generated rubbish
Could be correct, could be not, who cares?
jve•May 28, 2026
Nop - that is a niche site, every product is stocked locally and it is to immensely reduce time required to insert new products. And it is not to generate new information, but to add existing info (apart from translation but most languages are known to check).
nikole9696•May 27, 2026
I'm in my 50s and all my friends and family hate AI. My parents in their 70s can't really comprehend it. They got used to search and want nothing to do with AI. Some company is trying to build an AI data center where they live, and they're livid about it.
Personally, I like it sometimes, but I'm a techie and understand the limitations, and I dislike not being given options to use or not use it.
nonethewiser•May 27, 2026
Seems the main claims against it center around:
1. Labor replacement
2. AI is actually bad in-and-of-itself. Doesn't work, not useulf etc.
3. Energy concerns
pastor_williams•May 27, 2026
I've also seen water usage concerns.
thewebguyd•May 27, 2026
The thing is, I hear those concerns a lot too, from people that are daily heavy users of AI.
I wonder how many still say they have a negative sentiment on AI yet are still paying customers.
Thanemate•May 28, 2026
Odd not to see my main concern, which is gathering large amounts of human knowledge in a machine that is ultimately tweaked by the "selected" few not just for profiting off of it, but to also (ultimately) have a big influence on what is appropriate and what isn't.
I have no issues with the technology itself.
scottmcmac•May 27, 2026
A recent NBC News poll gave "AI" a -20% net approval rating. If you're in the U.S., the people you run into IRL are kinda weird.
(I didn't quickly find polls for the rest of the world)
thewebguyd•May 27, 2026
Perhaps they are, but I think what I think is odd is how many are simultaneously opposed to the effects of AI (data centers, environmental impact, job loss) yet also are daily, paying users of it even outside of work. I know several who are like that.
I wonder how many in that poll have a negative sentiment about AI, yet are also heavy users. There seems to be some kind of disconnect going on?
neltnerb•May 28, 2026
> I wonder how many in that poll have a negative sentiment about AI, yet are also heavy users. There seems to be some kind of disconnect going on?
Being a heavy user seems like it'd create a lot of resentment if you don't actually enjoy doing it.
If you have used a tool for years and years and suddenly it shoves in a bunch of AI, like Duolingo or Google, are you a heavy user who may well dislike the results?
I have to put in some work to not be a heavy user by any reasonable definition.
DiogenesKynikos•May 28, 2026
ChatGPT has been downloaded >1 billion times on the Android PlayStore. AI is incredibly popular.
People have all sorts of concerns about how AI will change society, but that's precisely because it's so useful for so many things. If it were useless or just a fad, there would be no reason to worry.
LtWorf•May 28, 2026
The startup where I worked had 1 million downloads (which is much less), but how many of those were using it daily vs trying it for 30 minutes and forgetting about it?
Less than 10% in our case :)
DiogenesKynikos•May 28, 2026
1 billion downloads, even if only 10% of those are active users, is a massive number.
Heck, I haven't even downloaded the ChatGPT app, but I use their website all the time.
AI use has taken off, and a large fraction of the population is using it regularly, if their own accord.
jrgoff•May 27, 2026
I've had conversations in recent months with several friends who are non-tech, "granola" type folks. They pretty universally expressed dislike for and concern about AI, but then when the conversation turned to whether they used it for anything, the all admitted that they do appreciate being able to use it for some tasks. I think it's complicated for a lot of people (myself included).
Aurornis•May 28, 2026
This goes for most tech topics. Not long ago tech sites had users who were aware that their preferences as a tech person were different than the average person.
Then it became so common to be a techy person and surround yourself with other techy people that it was easy to fall into a bubble and not realize it. When all of your news websites, coworkers, social media feeds, and friends in the group chat all think the same thing it feels like everyone in the world agrees with you.
You see it whenever social media topics come up. On Hacker News there’s never ending confusion about how Facebook continues to exist because the common refrain is “nobody uses Facebook any more”. Leave the tech bubble, though, and Facebook has a massive number of active users and activity. Whenever I mention this it gets doubted, denied, or even dismissed as lies from Meta trying to inflate their stock price. The dismissals always come from people who proudly deleted their Facebook account ten years ago and therefore have no idea what happens on Facebook, of course.
One of my favorite comment sections this year was when a lot of people were recounting how their aunt or cousin or grandma used Facebook and actually enjoyed it, which attracted comments saying they must be a rare outlier. It just goes too much against the bubble consensus that everyone hates Facebook and has a bad time when they use it.
Karrot_Kream•May 28, 2026
> Then it became so common to be a techy person and surround yourself with other techy people that it was easy to fall into a bubble and not realize it. When all of your news websites, coworkers, social media feeds, and friends in the group chat all think the same thing it feels like everyone in the world agrees with you.
FWIW I think it's a combo of people who spend all their time in online circles and and the effect on upvote sites where people try to appeal to the group sentiment to farm for votes. There's a lot of tech communities that consist of people who pretty much don't socialize in person and it was greatly exacerbated by the pandemic.
LtWorf•May 28, 2026
I know plenty in real life. Way way way more than online.
eudamoniac•May 28, 2026
As a hardcore AI skeptic, no one has run into me IRL either, because I pretend at work to be neutral, except to the one other skeptic who also pretends to be neutral.
kradeelav•May 28, 2026
Talk to career artists in real life (like animators); a majority of them have already lost their jobs due to AI layoffs.
8cvor6j844qw_d6•May 28, 2026
> My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they have fear of missing out on AI :(
One of my friend ended up spending too much time on Candy AI or some sort of AI companion thingy :/
sourcecodeplz•May 27, 2026
I think this is very true. They probably got scared of the almost 1b weekly active users of ChatGPT, and how people would rather ask ChatGPT than use Google. It will be a balance but this is a great opportunity for smaller search engines to make a real comeback.
therealdrag0•May 27, 2026
For what it’s worth, you don’t need to even download DDG. I just set it as my homepage on my iOS safari.
al_borland•May 27, 2026
It can be set as the default search engine in Safari, one of the few options Apple gives for search engines. No need to change your home page. I told my friend this as well, but I think that idea was slightly beyond his current mental model of how things work on the phone.
I’ve tried using the homepage method before with Kagi, as the extension to set it as the default search is a pretty ugly hack. I found it created too much friction, as I’m often searching from an existing page.
UberFly•May 28, 2026
Kagi phone app is pretty nice. I do all my searching in Kagi, the clicked results launch my default browser and the search results stay stable where they are.
Cider9986•May 28, 2026
Customize Search Engine (https://cizzuk.net/projects/cse/) allows you to make whatever search engine actually work in the address bar.
technothrasher•May 28, 2026
You have to set it to lite.duckduckgo.com (or noai.duckduckgo.com) or you still get AI crap from DDG too.
data-ottawa•May 27, 2026
The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life.
All conventions and user centricity go out the window with AI feature launches lately. If you look at examples from the last week it’s stuff like posthogs opt-out training, Copilot training, or Google’s antigravity chat-app switch.
I’ve had the worst customer experiences of my life in the last few months.
My health insurance company decided calling support meant I consented to them saving my voice for model training. They said you can opt-out online, but that option didn’t exist in app or on their website. It was only after calling back and threatening to sue that they added an option to opt-out.
This is the daily experience now. Seemingly every company is opting you into selling your data, breaking your workflows, disabling features you use, and force installing AI integrations you have to fight to remove. And several companies are perfectly fine to reenable or reinstall them after removal.
It should be no surprise to anyone people are mad.
What real value AI does have has been poisoned by premature rollouts (training users it’s crap) and forcing it on people too aggressively.
al_borland•May 27, 2026
After-the-fact opt-outs are something I never trust. Most data selling is opt-in and requires the user to opt-out. It seems to me that when I submit the form, the data would be instantly sold and by the time I get to the opt-out form it’s too late.
If this isn’t how it works, I’d be interested to know. The whole idea of these opt-outs seem like smoke and mirrors to act good while still gaining the advantage from the dark pattern. The only way to truly opt-out is to not register or use a service at all. There really needs to be legislation around this.
hansvm•May 27, 2026
That's how it worked the last time I bought a car. I submitted the opt-outs with the purchase paperwork, the ~sales~ data sharing agreements with 10k of the dealership's closest, paid friends were processed first, and I had no end of bullshit from a hundred companies I'd never interacted with previously.
chorizo•May 28, 2026
That sounds lawsuit worthy. If you submitted both sets of paperwork at the same time, a reasonable expectation would be for your opt-opt application to be processed first, otherwise it’s pointless.
1718627440•May 28, 2026
The GDPR specifies that opt-outs are also retroactive, but of course we know that all corporations happily follow the law.
tardedmeme•May 28, 2026
Corporations seem deathly scared of GDPR, for some reason, while in reality it's enforced about as much as American antitrust (not at all).
tactlesscamel•May 28, 2026
Same goes for any "regulation" in the states. Gov't does their job only when it brings revenue in the $$$$$$ territory. Everything else is civil and ignored - even if it's promoting the sale of millions of protected information.
Of all the reports I've submitted (evidence included) followups and fines have been issued to exactly 0 companies. Hell, Quadlock [phone mount company] happily acknowledged that their policy is to verify identity by requesting plain emails including photocopies of the credit card used for purchase and full state ID. Absolutely against regs.. who cares? Not the SCC nor the FTC.
somewhatgoated•May 28, 2026
While it’s not enforced perfectly, saying it’s not enforced not at all is just untrue.
You can’t un-sell data though. Sure you may ask nicely that the buyer doesn’t use it and deletes it, but at that point the cat’s out of the bag.
1718627440•May 28, 2026
In praxis, yes especially if it has already left the jurisdiction.
Disregarding that, laws don't apply to the first processing party only. If you keep data, that you got informed are not consented to anymore, it is the same as if you keep selling fenced goods.
cassianoleal•May 28, 2026
I'm not sure the entities buying that kind of data care too much.
ghastmaster•May 28, 2026
>The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life.
>I’ve had the worst customer experiences of my life in the last few months.
I attribute that to the massive amount of tax breaks and money that has been funneled to them by various governments. The government is the customer that they are appeasing right now. As soon as the spigot is turned off, they will be more inclined to appease us.
I do not know the consumer or b2b AI market well right now. I do know that billions of dollars are at stake from government sources. A smart company would focus on that.
marcus_holmes•May 28, 2026
I'm not aware of any government handouts for tech companies adding AI to their products, can you give an example, please?
One fascinating thing about LLMs is the degree of evangelism it inspires in some. You can explain some of that with paid micro influencers, people invested in the success of AI, consultants looking for workshop opportunities and all that, but I know enough people with no skin in the game at all, that turned into very vocal advocates.
I think to some degree, that effect is also at play here. CEOs, product managers etc are simply amazed, and want to spread the good news. I doubt they can even _comprehend_ that others might not be as excited as them.
tripledry•May 28, 2026
I'm sure there is an effect when people talk on socials (linkedin, company intra etc) that they are marketing themselves. This is why I won't take any claims on socials that seriously.
I'll believe it when I see it.
galangalalgol•May 28, 2026
I can't decide how much I like it myself. It can help me with really complicated projects. Software and otherwise. It has completely replaced my usage of non site local search engines. But I don't like how lazy it makes me. I don't vibe code, I understand what it is doing, and have it make adjustments typing it examples of what I want. But I can see myself getting lazier quckly. And when I find a task too hard for it I waste a lot of time trying to get my prompts correct before taking over.
codewench•May 28, 2026
You also have to consider a ( I would argue large ) percentage of those evangelists are simply lying for financial gain. They see profit, or at least reduced costs, and quite simply don't give a shit about customer experience or anything like that.
pelotron•May 28, 2026
Or this is finally their chance to be the smart guy who was in on the ground floor.
daniel_reetz•May 28, 2026
And this is the first technology that directly strokes their ego
PaulHoule•May 28, 2026
One character I find interesting is Ezra Klein from the New York Times who desperately wants to see something positive come out of markets and industry and has an enthusiasm for AI which is not shared by his audience. He struggles to understand that skepticism and I think that's bad for his project.
At least he's not one of the many mooks who are doing ChatGPT-assisted (Grok-assisted?) blogging and boasting about it, even when it goes wrong, like Casey Handmer.
sharperguy•May 28, 2026
I'm someone who makes extensive used of LLMs and agents for daily research, and I 100% of the time ignore the AI summary that google gives at the top of the page. If I am performing a web search, I've already decided that I'm explicitly NOT looking for an LLM summary.
PaulHoule•May 28, 2026
I think Google's "AI Mode" does better at integrating search results and answering questions. It can find articles and scientific papers that match my memory in most situations and does a lot better at Arknights question answering than Microsoft Copilot (reskinned ChatGPT) does.
giancarlostoro•May 28, 2026
> posthogs opt-out training,
It should seriously be 100% illegal to force someone's content into AI training without their explicit consent, and no not opting out should not be an escape hatch.
lukashoff•May 28, 2026
One of the recent rollouts that really grind my gears was Spotify rolling out LLM explanations of songs. Which is the most useful wasteful piece of sh*t ever. Why would I want to get a theory of what is 174bpm and other random crap.
It is insane, and I hate modernity and every single modern product that just shoves random LLM crap at you and pretend they are not AI-enabled.
somewhatgoated•May 28, 2026
Spotify is a toxic shit company overall that is a general detriment to all musicians everywhere.
If you care about music just a little bit you should stop using it today and directly buy music from the artists you care about.
ninalanyon•May 27, 2026
> downloading DuckDuckGo.
What for? Just use the website via your favourite browser.
wiether•May 27, 2026
> My friends who previously had no interest in technology
Their friend are probably the kind of people conflating Chrome/Google with "The Internet"
And I think on Android its even less clear the distinction between the browser app and "Google"
al_borland•May 27, 2026
That’s what I told him… just set Safari to use it in Settings, but it seemed like he had already done it and was now invested in using a whole new app just to switch search engines. This is a symptom of the app-based model people now think in.
pavon•May 27, 2026
And that mindset makes this move even more risky. If people move away from Chrome to DDG, Brave, or Kagi Orion browsers which block tracking by default, then that will harm their ad income even more.
carlosjobim•May 27, 2026
What for? Just tap the icon to open the app.
burnte•May 27, 2026
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
Too late, people have started moving. They have to act fast to stop the migration from growing.
NuclearPM•May 27, 2026
Downloading a search engine website?
Cider9986•May 28, 2026
DuckDuckGo makes a webkit wrapper with their branding. It does actually have some good features built in, but I don't recommend it over Brave or Mullvad Browser.
abustamam•May 28, 2026
I'm curious — how do non-techies know? During stand-up the other day I was making small talk like "hey did you guys know that Google search is dead" and everyone was like "it is?" and I had to link to the Google IO to prove it because indeed, doing a Google search worked the same way it always had.
So I'm wondering how other folks are finding this out.
dogwalker5000•May 28, 2026
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
Won’t be surprised if Google thinks their Golden Goose is terminally ill and AI is the replacement.
Google is really an information provider powered by ads. That’s what people use their search for - to get information.
Google’s search basically has the internet as its backend - information-wise. I think it’s inevitable that AI slop (output from low quality GenAI) will render it useless eventually.
So Google’s solution is to build their own AI with information curated by them to try to stay the front page of the internet.
wsc981•May 28, 2026
> The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life.
I’m getting extremely annoyed by the Base44 ads I see on YouTube every other video.
First I pressed skip all the time, but the ads keep popping up. So now, every time I see it, I click on the ad and then immediately close the site. At least I can make their aggressive ad strategy a bit more expensive.
ipaddr•May 28, 2026
Its probably why you keep seeing them a click is marked as interest and clicking away doesnt cost anything they refund it.
wsc981•May 28, 2026
No, for a long time I never clicked. But since I keep seeing the freaking ads, I decided to click on them, because from what I understand they have to pay money for each ad click.
gorgmah•May 28, 2026
Youtube revanced on your phone + ublock on firefox and you'll never see youtube ads again. There's also a replacement app for android TV that I forgot the name of that works well. Do not use chrome, google nerfed its ad-blocking capabilities a while ago
account42•May 28, 2026
I can't fathom why anyone would still willingly watch ads when there are so many ways to block them online.
DiogenesKynikos•May 28, 2026
> AI being pushed so hard.
What I see is people using AI of their own free will, because it's incredibly useful.
It's true that inside tech companies, AI is being pushed into products, but outside of those companies, normal people are rapidly adopting AI for all sorts of daily uses.
"I don't know what this symbol on my dishwasher means." -> Ask AI.
"Why is my bread not rising properly?" -> Ask AI.
These are the types of things that previously would have taken a lot longer to figure out, but that you can get an immediate answer to with AI. That's the fundamental reason why it's taking off. Not because it's being pushed.
radarsat1•May 28, 2026
You can talk all you want about generalization and reasoning ability and AGI, but the fact is that it's also useful simply as a really user friendly database.
Even if it's only able to report facts from its dataset or perform simple synthesis of search results.
That it can actually reason to a certain extent is bonus points.
VerifiedReports•May 28, 2026
Google has been ever-worsening trash for years.
Their "AI" bullshit did in fact push me to finally make DuckDuckGo my default page. Happy to hear others are switching too.
thaumasiotes•May 28, 2026
DDG has the same AI overview at the top of their search results that Google does. What's the goal of switching?
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
we have moments like this every few years (almost as frequent as crypto waves in recent memory), but they keep chugging along.
couple years back it was all about saying the GPTs have replaced search for people and how google is dead. now when they implement the same, it drives people away.
i can imagine how it can be difficult to be in their shoes, when any change is met with negativity. no surprise that the core interface has...had not changed all this time.
context: left to ddg almost a decade ago in a similar exodus wave.
Tade0•May 28, 2026
All that being said the product is genuinely worse now.
The other day I googled "I'll be resolving" in quotation marks as I usually do when I'm unsure if it's idiomatic (or grammatically correct for that matter) English.
AI mode replied with: "I'm on it. Tell me what you're working on, and I'll jump right in with the exact steps, scripts, or details you need to tackle it! What exactly are you looking to resolve?"
Just give me the damn phrase used in a sentence along with the number of results so that I can assess how common this expression is.
dopidopHN2•May 28, 2026
Been using Google since they exists.
I stopped without any issue and even thinking too much about it 2 years ago.
This include work.
I use DDG, kagy and the LLM du jour .
Again, no friction. No plan. No transition période. I just changed the default search engine on a whim.
giwook•May 28, 2026
While there is a meaningful subset of the population that will do this, I wonder if the vast majority of people, even if they share the same negative sentiment towards AI and in particular how Google is pushing it in their products, will find the friction in changing up their workflows and routines to be too much to actually change things up.
While Google has certainly failed with their products before, by and large as a company they are "too big to fail" at this point so to speak where the myriad products they offer have become a very significant part of the digital infrastructure on which much of the world runs.
Anecdotally I've also switched to DuckDuckGo in the past because I didn't want Google looking over my shoulder on my browsing history (this was pre-AI), but I ended up coming back because I felt the search results weren't quite as good (or perhaps it was just in my head, and the differing UI was enough to throw me off).
And this may be a contrarian opinion, and while I hate the idea of Google mining all of my data and monetizing it, I actually find value in the AI 'previews' that Google provides (and will often ask it follow up questions as a means of getting 'free' LLM responses back for 'easier' prompts that I don't want to burn Claude tokens on).
fsflover•May 28, 2026
> weren't quite as good
A lot of people keep saying this, and yet I never saw a reasonable example. Whenever DDG fails for me, the Google's results are even worse.
mt_•May 27, 2026
As someone who has been driving DDG for the past 6 years, i have switched to Google back due to the new AI mode,, its such a nice quick way to check information and validate ideas.. no friction included.
Legend2440•May 27, 2026
Both statements can be true, you know.
Some people can love AI mode while others hate it.
I use !s for my fallback. I usually don't need the !g unless I want to see CAPTCHAS.
notepad0x90•May 27, 2026
!g is the best of both worlds.
feverzsj•May 27, 2026
Feels like google is purposely downgrading non-AI search results
bell-cot•May 27, 2026
They were doing that long before they offered "AI" search results.
gblargg•May 27, 2026
AI is downgrading non-AI search results with AI slop pages that get ranked high.
lisplist•May 27, 2026
I switched to DDG about a year ago and it works fine for me. For some queries, Google still surfaces better results, but DDG is good enough that I don't really miss it.
The only Google service I haven't been able to replace is YouTube - no real alternative. I still use Google Maps as well, but could probably switch to Apple maps without missing much. For hiking trails, Apple Maps has often been superior. I briefly tried OpenStreetMaps years ago, but the lack of traffic data and the fact that it gave me bad directions made it untenable.
spencerflem•May 27, 2026
This is my experience as well.
cocoto•May 28, 2026
For hiking trails, I highly recommend https://www.comaps.app/. It's simply miles ahead of Google Maps and Apple Maps for hike and biking.
lisplist•May 28, 2026
Thanks, will have to check that out! Also use Strava, so maybe I should just refer to the heatmaps
sublimefire•May 28, 2026
Very similar experience. As an example I had to user Naver and Kakao maps in Korea instead of Google and those apps gave me sort of another perspective that other apps can be better than G for sure. For youtube I have been fighting the addiction and eventually disabled all options around privacy and eventually reduced the use quite a bit as they do not render the feed of random videos and shorts anymore (just subs).
notepad0x90•May 27, 2026
I'll have to see Google's stats as well. I went the other way leaving DDG for google AI mode. I use ddg still if I just want it to find a site. if I want answers, I use Google.
I would say it's more than visits that count, how many people are staying in the DDG or Google home page doing things? a lot more with Google I'd think. they've succeeded in trapping me in their product, instead of navigating away, and I'm happier for it. And... i still don't get what people's problem is (quality wise that is), you don't have to use AI results right, and it's pretty obvious what the AI interaction portion of the page is? I'm sure ad blocker extensions can remove it entirely as well. DDG's quality is not just lower, it requires me clicking around to get AI assisted summary.
I just don't get it, is people's time not valuable? even if half the time the AI results are wrong, it offsets (for me - and it's more like 5%) the time I waste clicking on random sites, some of them ad-trodden (where a blocker isn't available), outdated,etc.. and I usually don't even go to the second page of the result where as the AI reviews more than the first page or two to give me a summary. I'm saving lots and lots of time, getting more done with it.
This is tech, not religion, but it feels like people are conflating the two. it's just a tool that's used to search things.
marginalia_nu•May 27, 2026
Yeah, starting from a much lower baseline than DDG, I've had something like a 10x increase in queries last ~week. Seems like a lot of people are looking for alternatives.
For as much as how the startup space loves to pay lip service to contrarian bets, people sure do all be running in the same direction.
culi•May 27, 2026
thanks for your work. Marginalia is important for the survival of the human internet
Just looked at it for the first time. My first impression - grey, gray and more grey. Please help brighten our day by adding some color to the page?
1bpp•May 28, 2026
I think that it's a comforting break from neon purpleblue gradients and squircles with animated particles flying around in the background.
tokai•May 28, 2026
Seems cool. I'll definitely try using it. Do you have a shorter url? Its going to be an uphill battle telling people to check out" marginalia no not magnolia HYPHEN yeah hyphen not underscore or dash search DOT com"
qsort•May 27, 2026
I truly don't get Google's move.
I'm sure the model is fine, but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. If I wanted to ask an AI, why can't I ask the one from my subscription... that I'm already paying for... that's actually good... that can also search the web?
I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
mrweasel•May 27, 2026
> I truly don't get Google's move.
Users aren't adopting their AI at the rate shareholders expect, so they now force the adoption at the cost of search.
Legend2440•May 27, 2026
According to Google, users are adopting it. They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries.
>Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. As people have realized just how much more Search can do for them, they’re searching more than ever before — so much so that last quarter, we saw queries reach an all-time high.
>Another place where we’ve been rapidly innovating is in the Gemini app. Last year at I/O, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today, we’ve surpassed 900 million, more than doubling in a year. In that same time, daily requests have grown over seven times.
gazebo2•May 27, 2026
I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something, so of course they're seeing high usage. Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.
SirFatty•May 27, 2026
"I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something"
No, it's not. AI mode is something you have to select (in the search window). There is an AI overview provided with your basic search results.
That's what I get, in the UK, logged out of Google, from a search in Firefox omnibar using "Google" as provider.
I'm aware that they have other things that can be described as AI modes.
blueg3•May 27, 2026
That's AI Overview, just like it says at the top of the box.
AI Mode in that screenshot is the tab to the left of All.
esseph•May 27, 2026
> Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.
I wonder how much the search results thing is related to language and locality. I have a hunch but I haven't really dug into it.
I live in the US, I speak English, and my browser is normally chrome.
The number of times I've gone to the 2nd page in Google search results you can probably count on one hand in the last 15yr or so.
I use the standard Google search things when I want specifics... Using quotes, site:news.ycombinator.com to search a site, or add a "-" to remove results from that site. I use a "+" when needed. Nothing fancy.
When people say they can't find things in Google search, I'm genuinely baffled. I have a strong suspicion that it has something to do with the combination of browser, locality, and language. Why? Could be tons of reasons for that, some probably anti-competitive on the browser side.
I have tried to use ecosia, start page, duckduckgo, etc. Was never happy with those results and always ended up back at Google search.
I just want to know what's different, you know? I look up some pretty obscure stuff sometimes.
Note: I do normally have my Google account logged in in the browser when doing search, however I have search personalization and history turned off, so that should not be influencing the quality of my search results compared to whatever "baseline" is.
WarmWash•May 27, 2026
It started when Google made a hard push to improve search for everyday people. They essentially nerfed "expert google skills" to bolster "noob google skills".
Regular people are/were really bad at using google, so google moved towards showing what it thinks you want rather than what you want. They paved over the skill gap between people who understood keywords and word order, and people who just typed in a quasi legible sentence to find something. In doing so though, they killed a lot of skill that people had developed with google for years.
Basically they made the game worse for pros so it could be better for amateurs. I have never heard a non-tech person complain about google getting worse over the years, and they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.
pbhjpbhj•May 27, 2026
>"a hard push to improve search for everyday people"
Citation needed. A hard push to change their search offering, sure. To improve it? Well, if by improve you mean 'require more interaction and viewing of more adverts on average before leaving' ...
WarmWash•May 27, 2026
Again, if you have been on HN since 2009, you are likely on the far fringe of Google's user demographics, which at this point is pretty much "The average human being on Earth".
I would bet all of my money that you never once did a Google search (pre-LLM mania, but maybe even after) that looked like
"What kind of clothing is best for when you are going hiking around the lake, so my feet don't get so cold?"
Sadly, this is how most humans have used a search engine for decades now.
watwut•May 27, 2026
I find that weird assumption. Why would you expect HN people not do such searches? They worked for years.
And you frequently ended up finding a discussion forum with around that question and relevant discussion under it.
WarmWash•May 28, 2026
Because OG tech nerds would google like
Forum hiking warm socks backpacking trail running
Which was basically a structured programmatic query that activated the old google algo just right.
esseph•May 27, 2026
I just don't know what I'm doing different, I'm just keyword searching and using a couple of inclusive/exclusive flags.
Was I the frog in the pot and now I'm cooked? I don't feel like in search Google any different from maybe 2005 or so.
childofhedgehog•May 27, 2026
How do you get the inclusion/exclusion to work? My last few attempts to use “-x” really didn’t exclude what I expected, and almost all the results had “x”. I have seen massive changes since 2005.
xp84•May 27, 2026
> they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.
Hard agree. The only thing I've ever witnessed another person do on Google (this is only an incredibly slight exaggeration) is:
1. Type a 'query' - either a brand/website name or some kind of stream of thought like "dishwasher error 03F" (without quotes)
2. Click or look at the very top thing in the results.
This used to mean 80% of the time they'd click the top ad, 20% the top organic result. Then they started putting non-clickable "answers" in that top spot, which would always be accepted as 'the right answer'. When those appeared, approximately no one would ever click any 'blue links.' These started out pretty reliable because they were just direct extracts from sites like IMDB: "Brad Pitt is 44 years old" etc.
Now it's like 60% of the time an ad, 40% of the time their bargain-basement-model "AI Overview" slop. Either way, approximately all users always just use whatever is on top and ignore everything else.
esseph•May 27, 2026
> Either way, approximately all users always just use whatever is on top and ignore everything else.
Wtf
khimaros•May 27, 2026
this has not been my experience on desktop or Android. did you opt into something? are you accessing via browser search or Google.com?
autoexec•May 27, 2026
> They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries.
Technically, all the people who google "how do I disable this shitty AI mode in google" would count as "driving an increase in total search queries."
An easy way to make a feature popular is to force it on everyone. Then you can pat yourself on the back when 100% of your users are using it!
baggachipz•May 27, 2026
I remember when Internet Explorer was the most used browser. The fact that people were just using it to download Chrome doesn't matter to stats.
mrweasel•May 27, 2026
While I'm not opposed to the idea that Google AI mode is so good that people use it more, I also feel like the average person only have so many queries per day. Google statement would indicate that people had a number of queries that they just opted to ignore, because find the answers was to cumbersome.
I'm not entirely sure I'm buying that, unless users keep prompting the AI to reduce the amount of reading they need to do. Sort of interrogating the AI, rather than reading a Wikipedia page.
dandanua•May 27, 2026
The fact that users are using more search queries means they can't find what they want with a lesser number of queries. It seems that Google's PR team doesn't have an incentive to understand that, or thinks that everyone else is stupid.
bluefirebrand•May 27, 2026
My guess is that they are spinning it as "users enjoy talking to the AI instead of searching, so they do it more"
Rather than "users don't find what they want with the AI as easily so they have to spend longer with it"
Legend2440•May 27, 2026
AI mode isn't for queries, it's for questions. You ask it direct, specific things like 'how do I do <x> in <y>' and it provides a fast answer.
People have many more questions in their life than they do queries.
gbalduzzi•May 27, 2026
In programming forums like Hacker News people are incredibly detached from the average experience with technology, sometimes it is buffling.
Most non technical people I know asked questions to Google even before the AI overview. Instead of looking for the answer in seo-bloated articles, they find it in the overview.
I think google should improve in detecting the kind of query when I need a link that I don't remember, and deactivate the overview on those. If I search for "ryanair booking" I clearly need the url for booking a Ryanair flight, AI overview is useless
If programmers and engineers are saying "why would anyone want that?", odds are the product will be a gigantic success.
dpkirchner•May 27, 2026
These are the same folks that removed the very useful Google cache feature because people weren't using it any more. What they forgot to say is they hid the feature beforehand.
Of course they have more AI queries every day. They have full control over what goes to LLMs and what doesn't.
xp84•May 27, 2026
Really smells like some high-ups' bonus was tied to these KPIs and they're guaranteeing that they can't lose.
Sleaker•May 27, 2026
Isnt this essentially just slight of hand? Google basically defaults to AI search now doesn't it? So of course it will be 'fastest adopted' it's what is shoved in peoples faces.
If the results are garbage, or people have difficulty with it... Of course number of searches goes up. That doesn't mean the product is better or its not resulting in brand damage.
largbae•May 27, 2026
Don't believe your lying eyes, AI results are better!
rolph•May 27, 2026
how many of those queries contain keyword groups such as "how do i get rid of the AI search?"
watwut•May 27, 2026
> driving an increase in total search queries
I search more when I cant find the thing I am looking for. I search less when I find the thing I am looking for.
Second, it takes additional effort to not do AI search.
kungp•May 28, 2026
Yeah, seems obvious that more searches = results are worse. Who would go "Google sure is good nowadays, I'm gonna ask it for more things than I used to"
nova22033•May 27, 2026
That doesn't make sense. Presumably AI search costs more
jeffwask•May 27, 2026
> it's not Google Search
...and it really hasn't been for a good number of years now. I left a while ago when results were all SEO copy pasta blogs this is just a final nail in the coffin.
BiraIgnacio•May 27, 2026
Well, if the marketing teams are being told to reach people using AI or something like that, then Google is just playing to their real customers.
shevy-java•May 27, 2026
> I truly don't get Google's move.
Because Google wants to kill off its search engine here. It is very clear.
> I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
This assumes that Google search is still a high priority for Google. With their privatized adNetwork, they are trying to get people to trust them, and abuse users
via their ads. That is their business model. Google is an adCompany. It stopped being a tech company many years ago already.
Also they control the adMarket for the most part. Just look at youtube.
micromacrofoot•May 27, 2026
they ruined search a while ago and they want to stop the bleeding
mrdependable•May 27, 2026
They want to capture more of the value that was previously going to others. That's basically what this has all been leading to. Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own? Now they are going to do the same to e-commerce. Either they are going to let customers buy their products through Google's interface, or they won't be discovered. No more ownership of the customer relationship. Stores will be a backend warehouse and manufacturer now with Google taking a percentage of all profits.
georgeecollins•May 27, 2026
Exactly! They also have been letting the results of google search get seriously degraded by ads. Would many people prefer AI over google search circa 2010?
They killed their competition and now they will give you the product that gives them the most money.
strifey•May 27, 2026
This has been their MO with their search for a decade+ now. "Native" results hiding actual search results below the fold killed many 2010s era websites that relied on search traffic.
jeltz•May 27, 2026
It is the same thing as when they pushed for AMP. They wanted to prevent traffic from leaving google.com then too.
dpkirchner•May 27, 2026
In that case at least they could point out that end users got better results with AMP than they do with news sites w/o ad blockers. The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it.
pluc•May 27, 2026
The results are not wrong, they are AI. Google wants that to become a distinct thing that is neither. What's a better answer for Google than one that generates more usage? If we all push in the same direction we can make AI work, we just need to accept we will need to hold its hand for a while.
Forgeties79•May 27, 2026
I think this is sarcastic but man some people really do have some wild defenses for LLM’s so I can’t be sure lol
JumpCrisscross•May 27, 2026
> The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it
They believe they won’t be wrong for long.
eithed•May 27, 2026
> Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own?
I think this is a step beyond that - why should people be creating cooking websites when you can ask LLM how to cook given thing, while indeed, serving their own ads. It's the continuation of "we own content other people produce" policy
alberto467•May 27, 2026
You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes.
It’s just a better experience, 2026 is rough for a recipe site.
leereeves•May 27, 2026
> You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes.
Can you really though? Are the results delicious? I've never tried that.
hilariously•May 27, 2026
It's worse than you think, many recipe sites do not taste test their stuff at all, and often have very stupid instructions.
That being said, an LLM can give creative ideas, mix and match components, but you should not trust the details at all.
Damn, TIL. Now “Operation Mincemeat” seems less macabre.
eithed•May 27, 2026
This video tells me otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDQds7VZkfg (
Cold Ones - We Drank AI's Horrible Cocktail Ideas). This is a tongue in cheek response though, as LLMs improved significantly since then.
justsomehnguy•May 27, 2026
Is this mushroom edible.jpg
xigoi•May 27, 2026
Would you trust the tool that recommended putting glue on pizza to give you a good recipe?
lpapez•May 27, 2026
If the user puts glue on their pizza because a computer said so, that's a human problem.
The computer generated recipes can be useful as inspiration, but of course common sense is required.
thwarted•May 27, 2026
This "common sense" you refer to, is it the same common sense Babbage was subject to?
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
~ Charles Babbage
coryrc•May 27, 2026
I have/make rice starch glue. Can you put it on food? How are you supposed to know whether it's food safe?
Okay, so you don't trust LLM, so you go to a website instead. And... LLM-generated pages are SEO'd to get the top links. So you can't trust any website now (shoot, so much nonsense even before LLM, just more obvious to some of us). So basically everything on a computer is untrustworthy, directly from an LLM or not, unless you got yourself a copy of Encarta '97.
So you pick up a book at the local library. Librarians picked some books to order in subject matters they aren't expert in. How do you know those are accurate and safe? If the book says to use rice starch glue, how do you know the author didn't just copy that from an LLM? Or make it up?
Trust is fading entirely.
throwway120385•May 27, 2026
Presumably you test some things and use common sense for others. Like if you search for "grain filling oak" using an engine like Kagi(because Google just sells you the same product repackaged over and over) then you'll get people telling you variously to buy this grain filler compound that worked on their particular project, or you get people telling you to use drywall patch compound, or watered down wood filler.
The thing is, these things do produce some kind of result that looks like what you want. But it is still up to you to test these things on a project before you rely on them for whatever it is you really wanted them for, and that requirement doesn't go away just because you sourced the information from some LLM, or a book at the library, or Nick Offerman, or whoever else.
CamperBob2•May 28, 2026
Got anything from 2025 or 2026?
AI got better over the last couple of years, and you didn't keep up, and because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.
xigoi•May 28, 2026
The fundamental technology is still the same, just with more fossil fuel burning.
> because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.
How? Will it stop being possible to cook without AI?
CamperBob2•May 28, 2026
The fundamental technology is still the same, just with more fossil fuel burning.
That's like saying the fundamental technology behind an Egger-Lohner Hybrid and a Prius are the same. Technically true, but if you use that truth as a basis for decisionmaking, you're doomed. A modern AI model wouldn't make such a foolish mistake, so you'd better not make it yourself.
hansmayer•May 27, 2026
> You can also tell the LLM exactly what
You can - but it's not advisable, not in the least.
rolph•May 27, 2026
recall the pizza sauce glue trick, to stop cheese from sliding off.
there are other such goodies like mashed potatoes with broken lightbulb gravy, or fiberglass omelette, enjoyed by beldar conehead.
i wouldnt trust an AI for any recipe that i dont have personal experience with.
the safety rails are not very strong yet.
eithed•May 27, 2026
I agree and this response was following OPs example. But the point still stands - the goal is to outsource, in a weird way, the results being served = Google as such wouldn't need to pay for content. Now, if accuracy of such sources doesn't matter (or is good enough) for casual user...
redsocksfan45•May 27, 2026
There are virtually no combinations of food which are toxic, you can mix any food with any food and, while it might not be good, it will still be food. (The only exception I know of is alcohol and mushrooms containing coprine, e.g. inky caps)
Point is, unless you're stupid enough to add glue or broken glass to your meal just because a recipe told you to, it's perfectly safe. More than just safe, LLM recipes these days are utterly boring in their normalacy, and, unlike cookbook recipes, can dynamically adapt to what you actually have in your pantry.
onemoresoop•May 27, 2026
What really sucks is that Google pushed actual content creators out of the way in the first place. That is horrible. I think they should be challenged on this. Food bloggers, recipe writers, and creators have helped shape a huge amount of food culture, and they deserve to be protected rather than erased. If this kind of theft continues from the AI industry Im not sure what type of culture is is going to be left or what it is going to replace it to. I hope humanity is going to find a creative way around it, but I’m also aware how easy to manipulated the masses are.
bflesch•May 28, 2026
Their assumption is that all relevant culture has already been invented and capturing the status quo is enough to get 80% of the benefits.
badc0ffee•May 28, 2026
Evidently you're not familiar with Swedish Lemon Angels.
cogogo•May 27, 2026
If you are half decent at cooking it is actually pretty helpful to explore cooking something new. Just like coding it is nice to get specific answers to your specific question and it is pretty easy to reason about the quality using your own experience.
goosejuice•May 27, 2026
I would be interested in an example of this. LLMs will often combine recipes from random sites. If you're experienced enough at cooking to reason about the quality _for something new to you_, what value is there in an LLM here? I don't see any similarities to coding here.
cogogo•May 28, 2026
To me the similarity is I know exactly what I want to do but cannot really remember syntax (coding) or key variables (cooking) like temp and time. But I have enough experience to know if the output makes sense. Either one I can ask an llm a specific question and get a somewhat reliable specific answer that I feel comfortable parsing… this is actually one of the reasons I think I am eventually going to be on the local inference bandwagon. It is not far from being good enough for my use cases. And I will be able to skip the inevitable enshittification.
goosejuice•May 28, 2026
In terms of temp and time surely if you know enough to judge it's correctness, you would not need it in the first place? Code correctness is rather objective and easily testable. Cooking is rather subjective and only testable with great effort and time. I just checked 4 models on a 4lb pork shoulder in an oven. Flash was super off, suggesting you could pull at 145-150F for a sliced roast. Yeah, you could and it would fucking suck. The per lb time and total time also didn't add up. The others were better but varied. Only one (opus) thought to ask if it was bone-in. If you're very specific you could certainly have it aggregate a bunch of recipes to get a sense of what's close to a good answer, but ultimately it depends on what sources it chooses.
I could see LLMs being helpful to explore what's out there, like finding similar dishes or dishes involving a specific set of ingredients or dishes involving a particular technique, but a pretty poor tool for the actual technicalities of cooking or more importantly the uniquely personal aspects of food culture.
I dunno. I'd just buy larousse and on food and cooking.
cogogo•May 28, 2026
I recently roasted a 5lb leg of lamb. Temp was pretty obvious but I had never cooked meat this way so an idea on time is really useful. Google search is a disaster for this kind of question. And I guess I have never encountered a good general cook book that I feel comfortable building off of.
andrepd•May 27, 2026
Given most cooking or recipe websites have been AI slop for a few years now......
I'll stick with my mom's handwritten recipe book.
watwut•May 27, 2026
Google already killed cooking websites - when it refused to show them in search unless they added long slop content to it. And it killed blogosphere when it decided blogs wont be found if they just contain content without deliberate SEO play.
And I think the rest of it will end the same way. People will be significantly less eager to do all that free work when no one will be able to find it.
866-RON-0-FEZ•May 27, 2026
Maybe it's high time to burn it all down.
Block Googlebot from your sites.
Let's go back to webrings.
xp84•May 27, 2026
It's certainly long been clear that Google is phasing out even the idea that they serve end-users "links" to other websites. They're just refining the idea and making it more and more explicit. It absolutely places them in an obviously adversarial position to every single other website on the Internet, and anyone who continues to cooperate with Google today is probably handing Google the tools to put them out of business. Unfortunately, whole generations of people have grown up learning that the safest and easiest way to navigate to a website is to type some version of the brand into their browser (which Google likely owns outright) and click the first thing Google spits back, so Google enters this battle holding most of the cards :(
throwaway27448•May 27, 2026
Why would anyone go to google anymore tho? If it doesn't furnish results it's just a chatbot
c7b•May 27, 2026
I would assume that they've A/B-tested any such important change extensively and basically know that it won't affect their numbers for the worse.
throwaway27448•May 28, 2026
Given my own time at google, I highly doubt these a/b tests are constructed to actually yield a better product rather than push pet products
c7b•May 28, 2026
Then we should take your word over mine. My assumption was that those A/B tests will lead to products that do increase the numbers they were measuring (retention, conversion,...) at the expense of enshittified UX (up to the point of things feeling objectively broken, like notification badges re-appearing for the same items, settings that reset after user changes, search results missing,...). At least that was my explanation for how products by major tech giants like LinkedIn, Facebook, Outlook,... could end up being shipped with such flaws. What would you say?
worik•May 27, 2026
"Greed is bad"
jackp96•May 27, 2026
Also — it's objectively a better search product to give users what they're looking for right away.
Though that's not to say they're acting altruisticly here.
Google seems to be racing toward a new dark pattern where users learn to trust rely on the AI for neutral, smart objectively correct answers — which boosts trust in its sponsored product recommendations. Super gross.
dandanua•May 27, 2026
The intention is to kill the web in its current form, obviously. If only 1/3 of their users have left, then it is still a win for them in the long run, as they will gain the fraction of content they directly supply to users. Singularity is here and it's spreading faster than a cancer.
pupppet•May 27, 2026
They see AI killing the incentive for anyone to produce human-generated content so they're squeezing the last few bucks out of the internet as we know it before it finally goes belly-up.
nomel•May 27, 2026
My read on it is "AI is taking over internet content generation, and we can't filter because we'll end up filtering everything that makes us the most money"
osigurdson•May 27, 2026
I don't see search and AI as fundamentally distinct things. Usually I just want an answer.
ttctciyf•May 27, 2026
If you don't care about the facticity of the answer, AI is less clicks, granted.
hilariously•May 27, 2026
I dont think about less keypresses though - google search would let you type two words and get the thing you know you want, an ai search doesn't really fit the mode that old school search folks were using
malfist•May 27, 2026
For the same reason I read a book instead of just the plot summary on the back cover
gruez•May 27, 2026
You really want to read the author's life story when searching for a recipe? Or wade through some content marketing plug for some vacuum cleaner shop in Albuquerque when all you want to do is figure out how to change filters on your vacuum? There are definitely gems on the web out there, but chances are I'm not discovering them via search, and I'd rather get the straight answer from the AI.
bluefirebrand•May 27, 2026
All of this stuff is Google's fault in the first place with page ranking shit they built!
So now you're trusting them to provide the cure?
scottmcmac•May 27, 2026
Maybe we use search differently, but I very often don't just want an answer, I want to find a website to help me. Maybe it is because I need to do business with a company and need to find their website to interact with them, or maybe I saw a cool site awhile ago that's relevant to what I'm doing now and didn't bookmark it (because I dropped that habit when Google search was good), or want to read the official documentation about a product I bought, that someone already put a lot of effort into making complete enough and digestible to a wide audience... and the LLM responses tend to get in the way.
Like the parent I use good/paid AI when I want an AI response. So, yeah, an omnibox that knows when I want "an answer" and one that knows when I want to find a thing sounds slightly more convenient than switching between two tools, but Google search is not that Omnibox.
crazygringo•May 27, 2026
> but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search.
Not me. I really appreciate having both results simultaneously. I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great. I can expand it to see if there's more.
Or, if I see that the AI mode didn't understand my brief search query, I just glance at the search results below.
And often times, when I do need to follow a link, I find the source result links in the AI mode to be a better quality than the search result links.
It's the best of both worlds.
miltonlost•May 27, 2026
Hope the answer in the AI response is right!
tredre3•May 27, 2026
> I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great.
But how do make the determination that the answer is good and you should stop reading the page? Vibes?
aprdm•May 27, 2026
How do you make it without AI ? Are you parsing through millions of pages yourself ?
Forgeties79•May 27, 2026
The LLM results are presented confidently and succinctly in a way that is designed to tell you “yes” OR, it not applicable, it just mashes together statements (which often leads to a response that contradicts itself one sentence later). That’s not the same as your vetting search results.
Well before Google screwed it all up there used to be some correlation between top hits and what you were looking for. SEO has muddied the waters for many years now and it’s never been truly “merit based” or “objective” or whatever we want to call it, but generally speaking, the first results were the best by default.
aprdm•May 27, 2026
That hasn't been my experience. It has been working really well for what I need.
SEO optimization totally ruined google search for me for the past few years
Forgeties79•May 27, 2026
>that hasn’t been my experience
Ok, but it’s been mine. And clearly I’m not alone.
I feel like at this point any discussion about LLM’s has an implied “my experience” because LLM’s are super inconsistent due to not being refined tools at all. I’m sure your experience has been different, just like my experience has been different. I imagine you’ll want to chalk it up to operator error, but it sure seems like a lot of people have variations of my experience. If so many people are operating it wrong, then maybe the tool is poorly designed.
Understand that I use LLM’s pretty frequently. I am not “anti-AI.” I’ve used production tools incorporating machine learning for years now. But LLM’s simply aren’t the bespoke tools that these companies want you to believe, and they are definitely not a suitable replacement for search. It’s simply too inconsistent and will hallucinate answers. Google search didn't make up answers, it presented indexed sources that you ver in real time which I find to be a far superior way to do research. I don’t like having to guess when an LLM is just making shit up as it asserts something with simulated extreme confidence. Not only that, you can take a correct answer from a LLM and just start saying “know that is not right,” and it will start apologizing to you and generating other answers. That is a huge problem! I shouldn’t be able to “convince it” to give me a different answer.
Yes SEO made things objectively worse. Doesn’t mean we need to add another layer of issues on top of that.
asdff•May 27, 2026
No, you engage in what appears to be the lost art of media literacy and abrogate high quality sources.
aprdm•May 27, 2026
Right, so I have to do manual work going over 10000000 of results ? Or trusting SEO / google algorthm instead ?
asdff•May 27, 2026
No... When did you start using the internet?
aprdm•May 27, 2026
great question, probably around 1998 ! How is it relevant to 2026 ?
asdff•May 28, 2026
You seemed confused about how to use a search engine combined with media literacy, thinking you'd have to parse 10,000 results.
Kiro•May 27, 2026
Before AI people got the answer they needed from the snippets. That's the level most search queries are at.
gbalduzzi•May 27, 2026
I think it depends on what you are looking for.
Most of the time I'm looking for something very specific that there are plenty of articles about, but clicking on the articles results in popups, banners and an unhealthy amount of scrolling to get to the answer.
AI overview provides me the answer instantly.
Think about suff like "does china borders afghanistan".
In those cases you can be confident that the AI overview is right, and saved you time.
If it is a complex or niche question I tend not to trust the overview and go straight for legitimate-looking results
ChoGGi•May 27, 2026
Popups, banners? What are those?
crazygringo•May 28, 2026
Common sense.
The same way I make the determination as to whether a linked search result is good and I don't need to click on another search result.
It's not like non-AI webpages are inherently more trustworthy or anything. The internet is full of misinformation everywhere, you know?
culi•May 27, 2026
It replaced some of my most used tools with google search. I used to be able to search "define inoculant" and I would get a definition, synonyms, and even a history of the word usage. Now it's replaced by an often mistaken AI summary. Even "inoculant synonyms" doesn't work.
mauriciolange•May 27, 2026
I thought the same at first, but now I find myself relying on the AI answer (as it is usually reliable) and, also more and more, I continue interacting in the AI mode on the topic that motivated my search in the first place.
burnte•May 27, 2026
I think it's a multifold problem and they've chosen bad solutions.
1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down.
2. "AI everywhere!" put them in a panic, so they shoved am LLM into results, hoping it could pick through bad results and give good data to the user.
3. LLMs are expensive to run, so they're using a cheap model.
Cheap model + bad results = abysmal user experience.
There are too many groups with opposed interests fighting. Ad groups wants worse results so people search more (not realizing this just drives users away). Search groups want a better product so they stop losing users, and the AI group is being given a bad name because management is using their worst AI product on search. So the whole experience is just garbage.
gruez•May 27, 2026
>1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down.
Why would this work? Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?
burnte•May 27, 2026
> Why would this work?
Humans are predictable and hate change. For a short while it DOES work, people are used to great results, assume they're not using the the best keywords, and they'll reformulate their searches. For a while. After a while of all searches being not as good as they used to be, people start looking for other alternatives, which is why DDG is seeing an uptick.
It's called enshittification. It's easier than improving a product.
> Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?
No idea.
alex1138•May 27, 2026
I don't know how much control Goog has over Youtube despite owning them but I do note in passing they removed dislikes, removed upload dates (apparently?), removed 5 stars. Easier to trick people into ads
The platform has been various kinds of hostile for a few years now
SecretDreams•May 27, 2026
Soon, the internet will be so completely full of AI crap enabled by the mega corps that search will be quite a bit less relevant anywho. Maybe google is trying to front run the demise of the internet that they were supposed to protect?
1vuio0pswjnm7•May 27, 2026
"I truly don't get Google's move."
"AI" gets higher volume of use than search. This was disclosed by Google under oath
More traffic, more usage time, more data collection
I don't disagree with you, but google search has gone so downhill that I had stopped using it before they moved to the AI approach, which is actually pretty decent.
elorant•May 27, 2026
What if their move is to make AI search horrible so that OpenAI has no moves left here because trust in the product collapses?
varenc•May 27, 2026
> that can also search the web?
Slight digression: Claude/ChatGPT/etc all can search the web, but Google's AI already has a local copy of the web. It's much faster because of Google's TPUs, but also because Google has a copy of almost the entire web available locally. I recall others testing this and they observe that Google doesn't actually make HTTP requests to sites it references. It just uses its local cache. That's an advantage that all others seem to lack.
Of course, I agree that when I want search, I want search. But personally I've found if I want an LLM to very quickly answer a simple question, the type of thing all of them would do an equally good job on, I prefer Google's for its sheer speed.
ubermonkey•May 27, 2026
Bad results keep you on their site longer, increasing ad revenue.
basisword•May 27, 2026
I imagine most people aren't actually searching the web these days. They're searching for an answer to a question. They already now the 5-10 websites they use and go to those directly. They're mostly living in walled gardens, streaming services, or Amazon. When they use Google they want an answer and AI provides that.
ptdorf•May 27, 2026
> I truly don't get Google's move.
Because the goal is not to provide the best answers.
It's for users to train their AI.
jm4•May 27, 2026
They probably lose a ton of traffic to AI or anticipate that happening. This is a way to keep people on Google search.
Like you, I use both search and AI separately. Even casual, nontechnical users are starting to work like that. Including AI with traditional search results will keep a lot of users from jumping ship in the first place and will help win back users from ChatGPT.
I know a lot of people hate AI - at a minimum, there’s a vocal minority - but the reality is AI is eating search like nothing we’ve ever seen.
JoeOfTexas•May 27, 2026
I find it useful, and use it almost daily. Helps answer "how to" questions for working on my house, development or just general questions. If I need more info, I just look at the links or videos which are also right there.
To each their own.
stainablesteel•May 27, 2026
initially, not a lot of people were using gemini
google pushed it into their other products to attract people to AI
there was and still are a decent number of people who haven't really used it, as crazy as that sounds
paustint•May 27, 2026
On the flip side I retrained myself to ask llm questions on my phone or computer browser search bar with the expectation of getting an llm response toy question with no desire to look at anything else.
If I truly want to search I will ignore the llm results, but I like the convenience of a quick llm search that knows "all the things". I get the answer to my question without searching multiple ad-ridden websites (since the ad provider does all the things)
bko•May 27, 2026
> Just for a start, visits to its AI-free search page noai.duckduckgo.com between May 20 to May 25 are said to have increased by 22.7% on average week-on-week, with the figures peaking May 24 at 27.7%.
> The DuckDuckGo mobile app saw installs spike in the US by 18.1% on average compared to the previous week. TechCrunch reported this growth was sustained over six days, peaking at 30.5% on May 25. An even greater number of iOS users hit download on the app though, with installs seeing an average week-on-week growth of 33% and a peak of 69.9%.
Why do they report only relative numbers? These numbers alone are meaningless. This is just lazy reporting.
bee_rider•May 27, 2026
They wanted to write a story where this was a negative consequence for Google, I suspect, but the absolute numbers wouldn’t have supported that (they mention that it is inconsequential to Google a couple paragraphs in, if your browser can sustain the site for that long. Mine had trouble).
mossTechnician•May 27, 2026
noai.duckduckgo.com probably receives much less traffic than the main domain, which enjoys placement in many prominent browsers (and offers AI overviews by default, although they are far smaller and less likely to appear than on Google). It would be much more interesting to see absolute numbers... in the context of the main site.
phillipcarter•May 27, 2026
...because the absolute numbers are incredibly low. And I say this as a fan of DDG! It's just the reality we live in; those who are negatively polarized against AI enough to make this sort of change are just very small in number.
sunaookami•May 27, 2026
Because it's an ad for DuckDuckGo and PCGamer loves anti-AI engagement bait outrage articles because they bring clicks from outraged "gamers" and this brings them ad revenue, too so you are reading an ad for an ad.
input_sh•May 27, 2026
They used to have public-facing relative figures located on /traffic, but it looks like they got rid of that page some years back and now it just redirects to the homepage.
0.2% of google users try out duck duck go after google pushes more AI doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
noncoml•May 27, 2026
DuckDuckGo have to change their brand name if they want non-technical people to take them seriously
Hugsbox•May 27, 2026
This has been my issue with DuckDuckGo from the start... it needs to be something a little more catchy and that rolls off the tongue. Saying "I'll DuckDuckGo it" feels so clunky.
As small of a gripe as it sounds like, it really does matter.
yegg•May 27, 2026
Duck it.
jraph•May 27, 2026
Mind the F being dangerously close to the D on most keyboards here :-)
jraph•May 27, 2026
No need to turn a brand into a verb for this.
You look it up.
meatmanek•May 27, 2026
I still use google as a verb even though I use Kagi.
Hugsbox•May 28, 2026
I'm not saying that it necessarily needs to be a word that's easily turned into a verb, but it certainly doesn't need to be quite such a mouthful
tredre3•May 27, 2026
But none of Google's alternative sound any better.
I'll bing it.
I'll brave it.
I'll ecosia it.
I'll kagi it.
I'll startpage it.
I'll yandex it.
Okay "I'll brave it" does sound fine, especially in our brave new world, but it's still ambiguous when speaking it.
Cider9986•May 28, 2026
Duck it isn't bad. My order for best private search engine goes brave>Kagi>Duckduckgo=startpage
freediver•May 28, 2026
Kagi's -> 'fetch it' (dog mascot play)
mlongval•May 27, 2026
New Google -> perfect example of en$hi++ification.
hightrix•May 27, 2026
Google is the OG of enshittification. When DoubleClick bought Google, I mean when Google bought DoubleClick, that is when Google started printing money in exchange for a terrible user experience.
bitpush•May 27, 2026
Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. That's nearly 20 years back. Either you're suggesting Google Search has been bad for 20 years, or you're just being willfully ignorant.
cute_boi•May 27, 2026
The problem with DDG is they don't have their own infra like brave and rely so much on bing...
jraph•May 27, 2026
Yeah, there's no really good option in the search engine space.
osigurdson•May 27, 2026
I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar.
Of course DDG / others can do the exact same thing as they already have an AI mode. Maybe you can even set up ChatGPT as a search engine - not sure. The key for this use case is speed - it has to be nearly instant.
nemomarx•May 27, 2026
If you could use something like a ddg bang for it? like !chat at the end of the search and it goes to some router?
wlesieutre•May 27, 2026
In DDG's case, searching with !ai sends it to duck.ai
gchamonlive•May 27, 2026
Kagi does this really nicely, you just add a question mark at the end and it'll add on top of the search results an LLM summary of what's been found. It's subpar in quality but more than enough to aggregate the results by theme
nonethewiser•May 27, 2026
Yeah you'd need to support it in the term itself. So many queries coming from the url bar. As opposed to a toggle or something. I wonder if we have info on that - what percentage is input in address bar vs google homepage/app.
The problem is that's not discoverable though. The toggle on google.com would be nice but most people probably arent searching that way.
nonethewiser•May 27, 2026
>I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar.
This is the exact use-case, and it makes a lot of sense. The hard part for Google is identifying when someone wants search and when someone wants an AI response. It's somewhat identifiable by the input but of course thats extremely messy to determine systematically.
ajdude•May 27, 2026
Just do what Kagi does and turn on AI mode only if there's a "?" At the end of the query.
nonethewiser•May 27, 2026
They are already doing something like that though. It's not just a ? mark, but they are getting some signal from the input and classifying it as a search term or AI prompt. Not all inputs have an AI response.
And a "?" at the end is not going to capture a lot of real LLM prompts like "What should I pack for my vaction? Im going to Florida in September."
I mean you could do something like this. But it's really not much different than other manual search codes that are used by more power users like like "", "site:" etc.
They probably have a term for it but their AI response is just another "embedded result" for lack of a better term. Like displaying the local weather directly at the top when you search "weather", etc.
dekatron•May 28, 2026
It was funny how the other way when I searched for "nvm" to look up Node Version Manager, the AI mode thought I was saying "nevermind" to it. It felt quite jarring.
qwerpy•May 27, 2026
I'm as anti-Google as anyone out there. I block all their ads, refuse to pay for youtube, go out of my way to avoid their hardware, etc. But I have to admit AI mode is great. It's fast, free, not yet cluttered with ads, and useful. I treat it as a search engine that does a fuzzy search rather than the more literal text match search that we're used to.
I recently bought a Bambu 3d printer after Reddit/HN drew my attention to them and AI mode has been really useful for me to learn about my new printer and troubleshoot things. There is so much information and I don't have time to read everything. I just want to ask a targeted question and have something summarize the literature's answers for it.
It will be a sad day when Google inevitably enshittifies it, but for now I'm happy for them to subsidize my expensive LLM queries.
dgan•May 27, 2026
"Surely the last time after handing out carrots long enough to kill all competition, they switched from carrots to sticks, that sucks; but look? now they started giving out carrots again!! It will be such a sad day when no more carrots"
qwerpy•May 27, 2026
“Someone’s handing out free carrots but it may be sticks someday so I’m gonna be mad about it today and grow my own carrots. That’ll show ‘em! My neighbor’s roasted carrots sure do smell good though.”
yummybrainz•May 28, 2026
"I took their free carrots and now several years later, their carrots are a global ~monoculture that have been modified to grow faster but taste much worse. I don't like their carrots anymore but most other carrots are grown by small-scale local farms and can't be bought for cheap because the farmers never managed to get competitive economies of scale."
"I wish I'd supported the crazy folks who did carrot science in public and distributed seeds and allowed everyone to breed them so that we could all find better varieties for the common good! They still seem to be eating well."
(I see your very practical point, but I do think making the locally suboptimal choice in the hope of better long-term outcomes is a valid philosophical position.)
qwerpy•May 28, 2026
I also see the other side. I wish it wasn’t Google that currently has the best free product, because their well-oiled ad machine is going to inevitably turn the crank to find that sweet spot where the product is barely tolerable due to ads. But if I want free, fast, mostly correct lookups to plain English questions, what’s my alternative? Paying OpenAI or anthropic doesn’t seem to really change much. They’re going to do ads too. Abstain from AI entirely and continue to use non-AI Google search and take 10x as long to learn? Google still wins and I lose.
kenhwang•May 27, 2026
I'm the same way, I hate using Google search for searching because it's basically useless, and their other ecosystem offerings generally get enshittified over time so it's not worth paying for or relying on.
But if they're letting me using AI for free without logging in and I just need a dumb AI slop answer, then I'm more than happy to burn their tokens instead of my own. Any serious work goes to a different LLM provider. The switching cost for moving to a different LLM provider in the future is practically zero.
cmoski•May 28, 2026
Google search feels so limited compared to Kagi. I discover so many more alternative resources when searching with Kagi.
nitwit005•May 27, 2026
> It's fast, free, not yet cluttered with ads
That was essentially how people praised Google in their early days. It certainly has ads now.
felooboolooomba•May 27, 2026
Not only does it have ads, they intentionally vandalized their engine so you'd give them more clicks.
People already talked about the Kagi Quick Answer feature with the question mark.
But if you still want ChatGPT/Claude, then you simply create a custom bang and associate it with something like `https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s`
So now in your address bar you type "how to center a div !gpt" and it will start a session with your query
aembleton•May 27, 2026
If you use Firefox, then you can add chatgpt as a search engine with keyword gpt. Then you can type "gpt how to centre a div" into your address bar and get the same thing without routing it through Kagi, or needing Kagi.
You could get the same result from registering ChatGPT as a search provider in your browser.
leokennis•May 28, 2026
Me too. To be honest, I am not that interested in reading the first 5-10 search results to find what I am looking for. If Google can do that for me and summarize the main points, that's another 10 minutes of my life saved.
LtWorf•May 28, 2026
If it didn't just make stuff up it would be even better!
bratsche•May 27, 2026
There have been a few times where I found Google's AI mode useful. But most of the time I just want regular search results.
I'm among the people who finally moved to DuckDuckGo as my default. And for the occasional time when I want some AI mode I know how to get to Google.
ctrlkctrls•May 27, 2026
The world seems to be fragmenting, into those that see the value in the latest from Google, and those that resist changes like this. I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
I love Google's AI answers and their AI Mode tab. DDG is just Bing or a search vendor proxy, so I've never understood the fascination. At least Perplexity is different to Google. DDG seeing a 28% increase is like Google saying they saw a drop of 0.0000000001% in traffic.
HN crowd forget that the world isn't like us, they didn't grow up with Yahoo and Alta Vista, with Excite etc etc. Our SOP is to resist all change, anytime Apple brings out a new version it'll be the end of Apple according to HN - Apple - the biggest company in the world - what do they know about UI, "Liquid Glass sucks!" :) :)
We're a community in danger of pushing out those new to the tech world, recent graduates will be made to feel unwelcome if we continue to trash everything that the biggest companies in the world do, like we always know better. I implore the community to be more positive about the future, about the technologies that will take us into that future.
SoftTalker•May 27, 2026
I like having a direct answer to my question "how much oil does my engine take" but as of today I do not trust the answer to be correct, so I still cross check several sources, ideally ones that appear to be authoritative.
dualvariable•May 27, 2026
I asked claude to dig up the current Ford Bulletin for the engine in my truck to tell me the recommended motor oil. And it found the updated recommendations properly. I wouldn't trust google AI because I know specifically that the recommendations changed, and I don't want whatever the published specs were when the engine was first manufactured, which is out of date (and found on lots of low quality blogs). I don't even trust claude, but it gave me the URL to click on to verify and summarized it well enough that I mostly trusted that it wasn't using the cited technical bulletin and not a bunch of random AI-slop web pages.
ryandrake•May 27, 2026
I wouldn't trust any 'confident stochastic next-word predictor' to tell me fact. There are official sources of information for these kinds of car maintenance questions.
SoftTalker•May 27, 2026
Right, but standard Google search doesn't find them reliably either. Instead you get answers from enthusiast forums, "quick oil change" franchise sites, SEO slop, and maybe somehing from the actual manufacturer site if you scroll down.
dualvariable•May 27, 2026
Better than asking your backyard mechanic buddy who believes that you don't need anything other than 10W40 or something like that. You have always had to know who to trust and what level of work you need to do in order to get to an answer which is satisfactory. And in this case, Claude cited the manufacturer's bulletin which is the actual best source of truth that you're talking about.
pesus•May 27, 2026
Being critical about AI companies isn't what's pushing new people away from the tech world. The AI companies and the consequences of their actions are, as well as comments like this pretending the issues don't exist and that we need to just be positive about the "future".
And supposing these technologies do take us into the future: when said future is bleak and worse in most ways than what came before, people aren't going to be encouraged or enthusiastic about the tech world.
mrdependable•May 27, 2026
Are you going to enjoy a future where those different sources can't be found, so now Google requires you to have a subscription that includes data about vehicle repair? The great thing about the web before was that the information was available for everyone, it was decentralized. This is what they are trying to kill.
malfist•May 27, 2026
> I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
Don't you have to do that _anyway_? Unless you're just blindly trusting the AI to be correct, and if that's the case, please do enjoy gluing your cheese to your pizza.
argomo•May 27, 2026
Yeah, but perhaps we're getting to the point where the AI synthesis of all reachable data sources is going to be more truthy than trusting whatever random anonymous result you pick from the top half of the results page.
I'm also finding that the AI-cited links are often more helpful and authoritative than the top search results.
bigstrat2003•May 27, 2026
You're entitled to your opinion. But "we should embrace the stuff big tech is doing" does not follow from "let's be welcoming to new entrants to the field". They are, of course, welcome to their opinions as well. But even if they and I disagree on things, that doesn't make them unwelcome. So no, I'm not going to embrace the slop Google is putting out based on a spurious concern over welcoming newcomers.
48terry•May 27, 2026
> search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence
How do you know the answer is exact?
> or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
Where do you think that "exact answer" is being scraped and averaged-out from?
gverrilla•May 28, 2026
I've never seen such a reaction to Apple on HN. Quite to the contrary, there are a lot of fanboys here. A lot of macOS-only software is promoted here and I rarely see any complaints in the comments.
amoss•May 28, 2026
> The world seems to be fragmenting, into those that see the value in the latest from Google, and those that resist changes like this.
This reads as a strongly closed minded claim that has been "whitewashed into corporate appropriate speech" by an llm. If you cannot understand any validity to the other side of a debate then you are not engaging in discussion, no matter how your claims are dressed up.
asciimoo•May 27, 2026
I'm seeing the same increased activity around my search engine project (https://github.com/asciimoo/hister). While Google's decision is very controversial, it's good to see that people are seeking for alternatives - nice motivation boost to keep developing alternative search projects.
Imnimo•May 27, 2026
I direct a lot of questions to LLMs, but I want to ask a high-quality model, not the crappy one that Google uses to answer queries. If I'm typing something into Google, it's because I want a search result, not an LLM answer.
xmprt•May 27, 2026
I've actually changed that. When I type something into Google it's because I want an LLM answer - their search results have been useless for a while now. But that's only because I rarely use Google these days. I'm mostly using DDG to search (I might try Kagi at some point). Google is relegated to my phone when I want a quick answer where accuracy isn't critical without needing to scroll through a bunch of search results/open and read websites on a small screen.
ruszki•May 27, 2026
Kagi, unfortunately, is getting worse too. I think mainly because they don’t get access. But I’m not sure. I had to fallback more and more to Google, because Kagi couldn’t find exact matches, while Google could. Like texts which I copied from a webpage (for example from Android’s source), and it can’t find it.
Its search results ordering is quite good, but the accessible information for them seems to be shrinking. And quickly.
I’m at the point where I don’t search for complex things anymore. I use Kagi for things which can be found with any search engines. Not because I chose it, but because I was forced. This was not the case a few years back, when I started to use it.
Btw, there was one thing with which Google was superior all along: define <word>. And they fucking killed it in the past months, for a far, far worse solution. Nothing comes even close.
deltoidmaximus•May 27, 2026
If I'm typing something into a google it's usually so I can be hit with a Captcha on my home internet connection and then get search results that aren't even any better than DDG. And DDG has a LLM as well.
pesus•May 27, 2026
You've got the captcha issue as well? Seems like it's happening constantly now. I suspect Apple Private Relay has something to do with it, but I'm not sure.
floxy•May 27, 2026
Nope, not exclusively an Apple thing, since I don't use any Apple products at home, and have had an uptick in captcha requests.
fyrabanks•May 27, 2026
only time i ever have to deal with this anywhere (and i move physical sites a lot) is when using a commercial VPN provider. odd.
Jensson•May 27, 2026
If Claude starts sending queries to Google then Google makes you use captcha from that IP, likely you have been using such a bot and it sent queries without you knowing.
SubiculumCode•May 27, 2026
I do have to say, and this is from recent observations, not outdated ones, but their AI summaries get things wrong, alot, and these are things that gemini (proper), Claude, or ChatGPT subscription AI's don't get wrong.
sunaookami•May 27, 2026
I don't know why their AI summary model is so bad, yet when you just click through to AI mode it's miles better...
SubiculumCode•May 27, 2026
I've noticed that too. I am sure its because the AI summary runs on almost every query.
FergusArgyll•May 27, 2026
It also has to be very fast = small
yieldcrv•May 27, 2026
0.1% to 0.128% is 28% as well
gsky•May 27, 2026
I moved from ddg to Google ai. I find it really awesome
ChrisArchitect•May 27, 2026
What is the source of these numbers? Where is the DDG statement posted? Techcrunch? Thurrot? Links to links to links to nothing
arikrahman•May 27, 2026
I'm not sure why people go with DuckDuckGo as their engine as it's just trading Google for Bing. After learning about their deal with Microsoft, I started using Brave Search instead.
fckgw•May 27, 2026
Because they want something they know that resembles the old Google Search which DDG provides.
dawnerd•May 27, 2026
It's also pretty ironic for people to ditch Google over ai just to move to another search engine that has AI by default unless you happen to know about the noai subdomain. But it is good that people are willing to break the habit and try alternatives. That's what Google should be scared of.
For the search, some of the local results are wrong but I live in a very small area so it may be more reliable for highly populated areas. Lately I've been checking out Kagi for a few things just to see what the quality is like on competition. The anonymized chat (proxy) for AI is cool but very small context limit. Good for looking up random questions and they typically include references.
shevy-java•May 27, 2026
I am trying to find a replacement for google search.
DuckDuckGo was also useless. Qwant just copy/pastes Google's awful UI.
We kind of see that all search engines suck now, but in many cases there
is no real reason why that should be the case. For instance, why did Qwant
copy/paste Google's horrible UI? There is no logical reason for this other
than trying to bait in people who like the Google search UI. I don't like
that UI Google chose since like 10 years or more; Google ruined its search
engine already way before AI.
We really need a search engine that works and isn't control by a greedy,
Evil adCompany. DDG isn't the answer; neither is Qwant.
benced•May 27, 2026
... DDG had .7% marketshare (https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share). 28% more visits would take it to .84%. Assuming those all come from Google, that would mean .16% of Google users didn't love AI mode enough to switch.
Classic example of misleading with stats.
onlyrealcuzzo•May 27, 2026
DDG is probably regularly growing at ~20%+ anyway...
Google's search volume has been growing 12%+ per year for 20+ years, there's obviously much more room for volatility when you're smaller...
hansmayer•May 27, 2026
Well... it is still a huge relative increase. And who knows where it could lead them, if they can sustain that sort of growth on a weekly basis...compounding and all...
benced•May 28, 2026
The headline is implying that AI mode is super unpopular with the very large number "28" and not the more accurate number of .16.
Tubelord•May 27, 2026
I wonder what other alternative search engines Google lost to besides DDG.
30minAdayHN•May 27, 2026
I switched away from Google to Duck a few years back. But I observed that I mostly do !g and end up on Google. I read similar comments from many others on other threads.
Recently I switched to Kagi and has been a very happy customer. I never visited Google after that. Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone.
metalliqaz•May 27, 2026
Google is better than Duck's backend (Bing or Yahoo, IIRC)
However, I find that most of my queries don't require Google to find the result. Maybe once every couple days I do a search, don't like the results, and then add a "!g". Most of the time it's fine and I get to avoid Google's ecosystem.
specproc•May 27, 2026
Yeah, same. Switched my default to Duck about a year back although I've still got Google on mobile (something I only just clocked as I type).
Google search had degraded so badly pre-AI, I was already finding it equivalent for most things. The odd few searches benefit from Google, but nowhere near enough to warrant them as a default.
siquick•May 28, 2026
> Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone.
I just have Kagi set a custom search engine in mobile browser - no seperate app needed.
Unfortunately the only way to do it on IOS Safari is as the user above described, you have to install and configure an extension, there are no 'custom' search engines natively. Other IOS browsers are fine, i.e. Chrome, Vivaldi, Orion, etc.
siquick•May 28, 2026
You're right, I use Brave on iOS but Safari doesn't let you choose beyond a defined list.
nyjah•May 27, 2026
It's the french open. There's always been a bug with google search where sometimes I have to search 'french open' or 'australian open' twice to get it to give me the google scores. That bug still exists, sometimes it just brings up the site, but now it will also sometimes just go into AI mode and it will refuse to get out of it. Like even when you click for otherwise, it will force its way back.
The google live scores is a great feature. But when it's not coming up, even googling "french open google live scores" doesn't just bring it up every single time. It might if you try, but try multiple times over the day...
vessenes•May 27, 2026
Both can be true. A small number dropping off could be a big boost for DDG.
wordpad•May 27, 2026
> 28% more visits
So, from 3 to 4 people?
d--b•May 27, 2026
maybe AI agents prefer duckduckgo?
SubiculumCode•May 27, 2026
I dislike the AI summaries always popping up. I do now see an AI mode button. But so far I am not forced into AI mode. Is this happening for other people?
runjake•May 27, 2026
Append "udm=14" to your Google searches to make this stuff go away (for now, until Google removes it).
You can add a custom search engine to your browser with something like:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
Sometimes that will glitch out on Chromium browsers. If so, try this variant:
{google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14
dartharva•May 28, 2026
This↑ - I had also jumped ship to DDG until I realized this query string still works on Google.
jmyeet•May 27, 2026
If you want to use DDG then go for it. Let people enjoy things, I say. But let's not pretend DDG is suddenly surging, or even relevant really. It's a niche service largely for virtue-signaling by people who insist that "Google sucks". That's their core demographic.
Some Googling claims DDG gets 145M searches per day and claims Google gets ~14B. Well, 14B translates to ~162k QPS. I know for a fact that Google's traffic is significantly higher than that so I'm not sure where that claim comes from.
I honeslty don't believe a significant percentage of Google users even know Sundar made a statement about people loving AI mode or would even care, one way or the other. This is just more marketing fluff trying to will DDG growth into existence.
ymolodtsov•May 27, 2026
AI Mode is pretty good. It's quite reliable and much faster than any LLM chatbot.
AI Overviews are pretty bad though.
nikole9696•May 27, 2026
If I want AI, I'll use AI.
If I want Search, I want Search.
Give me the option.
Then again I switched to DDG like, last year.
bagol•May 27, 2026
Duckduckgo is blocked in my country. Reddit is blocked in my country. My country is also one of first countries agree to ban free (non playstore) android app installation. My country is so against freedom. What a shitty country.
cryo32•May 27, 2026
Which country did this so I can avoid the hell out of it?
Also sorry!
bagol•May 27, 2026
Indonesia
wasting_time•May 27, 2026
I don't have enough karma to vouch bagols answer, but in case you don't have showdead turned on: they live in Indonesia.
pjmlp•May 27, 2026
Yeah, nowadays it is a tragedy to find anything useful on the first results page.
partiallypro•May 27, 2026
AI snippets are just terrible, I always just scroll past it. I want to find the website I'm looking for, if I wanted to use AI I'd open up an AI app or website.
ashm1104•May 27, 2026
Oh thank God, I am not the only one here, I mean idk why but I am still not so comfortable with AI mode,and I just need Search, like good old search. I feel this all started when people were saying things like google search is dead or gpt will take over..
Also why is AI mode default?
josefritzishere•May 27, 2026
Consumers have spoken. They hate AI. Woe unto those tech companies who fail to listen. Your competitors will be happy to take your customers.
apparent•May 27, 2026
I wonder if the 28% more visits was mostly among existing users. I skimmed the article and it didn't look like this was broken out. It would be much more impactful/impressive if they brought in a bunch of new users, as opposed to ratcheting up usage among people who were already aware of it.
ThomPete•May 27, 2026
That will fall again and everyone will be back to google
juancn•May 27, 2026
Google has ~90% of search where DuckDuckGo has <1%.
A ~30% jump of DuckDuckGo is about 0.3% of global search traffic, basically a rounding error for google.
Still, it's an interesting signal, but not nearly enough to worry Google. If the jump had been 300% that would merit some thought.
throwaway27448•May 27, 2026
I don't think you can even refer to google as search anymore when it spews bullshit rather than furnishing results
schnitzelstoat•May 28, 2026
The ‘bullshit’ is often better than the results though.
I don’t have to click through a load of cookie banners and login popups to see it.
cheeseface•May 27, 2026
0.3% is definitely not a ”rounding error”. For Google it would mean roughly $650M drop in revenue.
crowcroft•May 27, 2026
Two issues with this.
- Search ad pricing is inelastic and auction based (supply goes down price goes up).
- A jump in traffic to DuckDuckGo does not mean Google is experiencing a decline in search volume. Number of queries per session has increased since launching AI Overviews.
geocar•May 28, 2026
> Search ad pricing is inelastic and auction based (supply goes down price goes up).
False. Advertisers have budgets and ROI targets. If Google cannot compete people will get their clicks elsewhere.
> A jump in traffic to DuckDuckGo does not mean Google is experiencing a decline in search volume. Number of queries per session has increased since launching AI Overviews.
But it does produce lower ROI for advertisers (in this case: CTR goes down because my ad is being shown to more people). Once user is on my landing page, my conversion rate is fine month on month (±1%), but my CTR on google got sharply worse by 5% since, and if it goes much further I'll stop completely on Google.
I doubt I am alone: Maybe others will jump ship sooner and the price will recover (demand goes down) but in either event Google is less net revenue, and given how aggressive their sales pushes have been I think it could be that big
nitwit005•May 27, 2026
That's users changing products in advance of a change, which is a relatively uncommon thing. We'll presumably see another bump when Google actually rolls out their changes.
furyofantares•May 27, 2026
Well, it's users trying another product anyway.
jstummbillig•May 27, 2026
Why would that be problematic? People are AI outraged. Some of them will move. Those who stay like it better.
dminik•May 27, 2026
I'm in these stats I think. But mostly because I was trying to do an exact search ("something to search") and discovered that google just ignores it.
There's a local search engine with a motto that translates to something like "Find what you don't know." Google has seemingly adapted "find what you don't want."
gdiamos•May 27, 2026
Instead of move to duck duck go I just stopped using search
Ferret7446•May 27, 2026
How much traffic does ddg get normally? For such a small player, 28% could very well be normal variance.
chasd00•May 27, 2026
I’d like to see the total number of visits. Also, I hope no one is reading this as a 28% reduction in Google use.
add-sub-mul-div•May 27, 2026
About a third of the comments on this site are in this genre of: imagine the typical reader is dumber than you so that you can explain things to them.
dtnewman•May 27, 2026
Google has 90% market share. DDG has 0.7%. I don't have a POV on whether AI mode is good or not, but surely there's gonna be some people who dislike it, and even if that's a tiny percentage, it can be a huge boost to DDG.
Retric•May 27, 2026
0.7% * 1.28 = 0.9% market share today.
A large fraction of the people using Google probably have no idea DDG exists. So the backlash is likely significantly larger than just the 0.2% who left to this search engine.
wiether•May 27, 2026
Chrome/Android users in the UE have, at least, heard about DDG.
FiatLuxDave•May 27, 2026
I rarely use Google for search, but I've actually gone back a few times just to use the AI search function. Occasionally it is useful, especially when I can't think of the correct term to search for.
But recently I had an entertaining experience with it. I was trying to apply a math technique to an application it wasn't normally used for, and I figured that somewhere out there was a paper or two explaining how to do what I was attempting. So, I tried Googling, and the response was something like:
"You appear to be working with two completely different areas of mathematics, which have absolutely no connections between them. That's fascinating! Would you like to know more about either of these two completely separated subjects which have nothing to do with each other?"
Not useful, Google, but definitely good for a laugh.
ShinyLeftPad•May 27, 2026
I read it because it's shown before search results now but I have to stop myself to not accidentally rely on it. Had two times it misinformed me pretty blatantly and its links to sources are wrong a lot.
KaiMagnus•May 27, 2026
I've been using it a lot in recent months, even though I was very critical about this in the past.
Of course, asking it to give yes/no answers or specific numbers is asking for trouble, but finally I can let something else read the SEOed garbage, point me in the right direction and let me browse the search results in a much more pleasant way than before.
puskavi•May 27, 2026
wheels gotta turn even if driver is heading towards ledge
worik•May 27, 2026
Duckduckgo.com has a AI advisor too. I know not of Google's, I really do not give a soft hoot.
The DDG one is good, useful
Tubelord•May 27, 2026
Also toggle-able with a very visible and accessible widget that remembers your choice.
1vuio0pswjnm7•May 27, 2026
Neither Google nor Kagi has an .onion address. Unlike DDG
freediver•May 28, 2026
Not sure what you use for search, but it could be better ;)
Thank you. I confess I only looked for it in the HTTP headers, no search
For example, DDG puts it in the content-security-policy header
dayeye2006•May 27, 2026
Feel duckduckgo can make an API for agent usage of search engine
dmkolobov•May 27, 2026
when I saw this headline my first thought was: wow DDG must not have a lot of users.
bborud•May 27, 2026
Let’s be honest: ai mode is less shit than the ads that, for some searches, all but replace all legitimate content.
But it is still shit compared to a search engine. Which Google no longer is.
There’s a real opening for actual search engines now.
arjie•May 27, 2026
Wait, Duck Duck Go has some 50 million MAUs and that went to 65 million MAUs or so. Google has 5 billion MAUs, so some 15/5000 users went to Duck Duck Go. That doesn't seem damning. 99.97% of Google users didn't go to DDG.
foxglacier•May 28, 2026
Yep but most news readers are innumerate and scientifically illiterate so they just get swept up by the narrative.
erfgh•May 27, 2026
For those that don't know, DDG already has an AI mode: duck.ai
da768•May 27, 2026
More like Google started requiring a captcha in Firefox mobile
luckydata•May 27, 2026
that 28% is what, 3 people?
felooboolooomba•May 27, 2026
I like the AI mode, but only because Google intentionally destroyed their search engine. There wasn't any real competition back then, but now everyone has access to AI. They're frantically trying to keep their search engine customers.
Years back Google temporarily put their old database from the good times up for searching. You could actually find technical results reliably. It was so nice.
RigelKentaurus•May 27, 2026
Makes sense to me. When I use Google, I am interested in getting the information quickly and in the right length and format, and am not interested in navigating to particular page(s) and looking up that info myself. Perhaps this will impact Adwords revenue in the long run but Google will find a way out. If Google didn't have AI mode, I would've stopped using it completely.
andxor•May 27, 2026
The same people who told you Google was going to zero three years ago because Search would become irrelevant are now telling you users will move away from Google because it’s removing Search.
When will people learn that the quality of Google’s leadership is better than that of the average Joe on Hacker News or a random tech journalist writing clickbait articles?
foxglacier•May 28, 2026
Looks like you're making the common mistake of counting all people you disagree with as the same person. In this case they're clearly different - AI proponents and AI skeptics respectively.
But your 2nd paragraph is spot on.
andxor•May 28, 2026
I'm calling out the "tech opinionist community" broadly speaking. I don't know if it's the same exact people but it's often the same forums or news outlets.
oofbaroomf•May 27, 2026
If DDG got 28% more visits, Google lost about .6% of their visits.
uejfiweun•May 27, 2026
I use DDG but the problem I have with it is that, well, the results just kind of suck. I have slowly used the "!g" operator more and more over the years to the point that now probably 95% of my DDG searches are just Google searches.
madrox•May 27, 2026
It's difficult to put my finger on it, but there is something about Google's AI UX that I deeply dislike. It has nothing to do with the quality of the response, which seems fine, but...
The header and input bars are too big. The max width of the response is too narrow. The font is too large. The way it renders onto the page feels weirdly clunky. There is a whole sidebar in addition to the top bar just for two buttons. In the + button under user input, they hide everything under there like model selection even though there's a ton of real estate to the right of it. Everything feels unnecessarily cramped on the page in spite of ridiculous amounts of whitespace.
Yet my ultimate dislike feels like something more than the sum of the parts. It feels like the Yahoo of AI. Anyone not relying on distribution advantages would know they need to do better.
It really speaks to Google's perennial weakness: they can never seem to make an incredible UX.
flaviolivolsi•May 28, 2026
I guess that's because they hardly ever build a product that's really theirs. Google Cloud came in response to Amazon (who built AWS because they needed it themselves), Gemini came in response to ChatGPT, etc. and it always shows
epolanski•May 27, 2026
I use a mix of Bing (as Edge Is my daily driver) and duckduckgo, and i have to say I rarely need to use Google.
I don't think that's because they are better search engines, but because their usage covers 99% of my queries and some AI like perplexity covers the remaining 1%.
ljsprague•May 27, 2026
I just don’t like the name.
crowcroft•May 27, 2026
Important context: In terms of total share of search a 28% lift for DuckDuckGo rounds down to zero.
The flip side is that multiple AI Search engines have overtaken and lapped DuckDuckGo many many times over in the past year or so.
motoxpro•May 27, 2026
And its 28% on the noai.duckduckgo.com domain, not in total. So it's even smaller.
abirch•May 27, 2026
could be the AI overlords going there to scrape more data.
starkeeper•May 27, 2026
Go Go DUck Maaan.
Even if the backend is bing, they have somehow made it work.
It's is a weird bonus for Microsoft.... If they don't try to copy google they can finally get some search market share!
LOL.
Hopefully this will inspire new teams to create indexed based search alternatives that are free and not enshitified, like google used to be in the early 2010s.
Hobadee•May 28, 2026
I love the way Kagi does AI - it defaults to a regular search, but if you add a question mark to the end, it will give you an AI answer. Additionally there is a small "quick answer" button at the top of all results that will give an AI answer if clicked.
Grimblewald•May 28, 2026
AI is like sex. I don't mind it, heck in the right situation I'm quite partial to it. However, if you keep trying to sneak it on me while I sleep, keep trying to slip it into agreements, keep involving people i didnt consent to being involved etc. The whole thing takes on a very ugly vibe. In fact I'm going to grow to be quite hostile toward it. Consent matters, not that I'd expect that lesson to land within silicon valley, second most rapey place in the USA after LA.
dev1ycan•May 28, 2026
You know what is crazy, that this whole bullshit "MDC" garbage "API" that websites and stuff like Outlook have is stuff that they could have had by having SIMPLER settings in their services, they obfuscate them like hell then they give the "solution" simple API to agents so that THEY can easily use their services, but not humans.
It's so disgusting, I hate this industry.
brikym•May 28, 2026
So a tiny fraction of people left Google to DDG? Seems like they both win.
yakbarber•May 28, 2026
it's a solution looking for a problem and google are desperate to stay relevant there.
We just don't need to search as much. But I _do_ still want to search sometimes, it's still a valid use case, just not as important as it used to be.
But when a do search, I want simple, relevant, external search results so that I can go straight to those good sources. Google isn't satisfied with their returns on that though.
arun6582•May 28, 2026
I want alternative to YouTube where dislike button count is shown.
timsuchanek•May 28, 2026
I hope they use DuckDB
matt3210•May 28, 2026
Ai is free now, how cool. Now we make an agent that uses google search ai in playwright.
frr149•May 28, 2026
We have all overused a single solution to "finding stuff on the web": the search engine. Now it's dying, killed by AI and by Google's greed.
There's no alternative left, no webrings, no web directories. If all your content is now only on your server, you're invisible.
somat•May 28, 2026
Do your part, link to a website you enjoy.
In some ways the last bastion of the real web are the web comics. Small personal projects where they link to like minded other projects.
PAndreew•May 28, 2026
I already submitted my take on this to Show HN: https://currantfeed.cc/. Noone gave a shit so it's most likely a very bad idea and certainly a very steep uphill battle. It's basically an Airbnb for websites that by default randomly sorts them and then you can filter by different attributes. Owners have to submit and maintain their "listings". It does have an optional subscription (I'm not sure if it works haven't tested it).
p0w3n3d•May 28, 2026
To be honest I use Google AI mode a lot. And Duckduckgo for private search. I default to DDG and use !g if I want to resign from privacy or find some merchandise to buy
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe•May 28, 2026
You mean looking for merchandise is something you're fine being tracked and funneled into the product with the best SEO game?
p0w3n3d•May 28, 2026
actually yes. Google has better mechanism of finding the products I am looking for. Some would say this is serene acceptance (fifth stage of grief). Also when tuning my browser too much towards the privacy, I kept getting mugged by "please show all the bicycles on the picture" for too many times, so I acknowledge I will be shoved up in my a...throat with new models of the washing machine I've just bought, and the sexy lingerie for some reason, that I'm not really sure of.
mock-possum•May 28, 2026
Wonder how satisfied all those new people are with ddg’s results
People don't love AI mode. It's just the only way to get good results on Google anymore.
thecopy•May 28, 2026
I genuinely find DDG more effective than Google Search. I have used it as a daily driver for 2+ years now. When i cannot find anything with DDG, i try with the !g macro, but results are more often than not even worse.
TonyStr•May 28, 2026
It certainly struggles a lot more with non-English queries. Been using it since 2019
ChuckMcM•May 28, 2026
The AI stuff got my wife to switch. So there's that. I've been using DDG for a while.
nikolay•May 28, 2026
I've been using Kagi for years and am not looking back. Okay, it costs money; it could sometimes be worse than Google, but the only free cheese is in the mousetrap.
txdv•May 28, 2026
how is duckduckgo using us?
shantnutiwari•May 28, 2026
duck shoves AI results down my throat no matter how many times I say no. And they are getting more aggressive with their ads.
+1 for Kagi. Been a subscriber for almost 2 years and no intention of cancelling, it just works.
narrowtux•May 28, 2026
I finally switched to duck duck go, not because of the AI push of google, but because of the constant nagging popups to download the google app. Just let me google things in mobile safari in peace!
timbaboon•May 28, 2026
I’m now paying for Kagi :/
lorentzokonwo•May 28, 2026
Well good for them, stop forcing AI on people.
CodeWithAgents•May 28, 2026
28% more of 100 users is still nothing ... who actually uses DuckDuckGo? It seems at least in the german market not relevant and a clone of BING anyways.
xinayder•May 28, 2026
I remember when I watched a presentation from a Google engineer at a summer school for AI tech last year and I asked why Google shipped AI slop when no one wanted it. He tried to gaslight me saying "users like this feature", and I told him to look up every major forum on the web, there is not a single good comment about Gemini being forced on. Then he said it was just an A/B testing and that not everyone had it enabled by default.
I wouldn't be surprised if they made up the statistics to justify the enslopification.
p-t•May 28, 2026
i started using duckduckgo after google added ai, and it runs way faster [i use lite.duckduckgo.com :3]
edit: my school blocks all search engines other than google though XD
deaton•May 28, 2026
The top of every google search result is a confidently wrong chatbot now. It feels like Google has sacrificed correctness, the thing they were great at, the thing that built their search engine into the biggest internet service in the world, in the name of AI.
liampulles•May 28, 2026
Google's Search and its AI result can alternatively help or hinder me, I find.
If I'm looking for a relatively straightforward and simple piece of information quickly (e.g. "wooden arch mirror stores linden") then the AI summary can be useful, because I don't need more than surface level info.
If I intend to analyze and understand something (e.g. "developer API issues Zoho Thrive"), then the AI summary and the general degradation in the quality of search results from Google really hinder me. I have to work to avoid a lazy and low value answer, whereas what I really want to do is go through various actual websites and reflect on them to gain insight.
lumost•May 28, 2026
I find it to be a fundamental hinderance as they use a cheap model. The cheap model gets confused based on conflicting reddit threads and then I get a wrong answer.
It's better to just ask codex to do the search for me, but this is much slower - but increasingly my go to. I wish there was a fast search api codex could hook into to answer internet questions faster.
trvz•May 28, 2026
I feel like the second scenario was never good with Google. You had to go through several search results describing other problems, and there was a high chance you still didn't find anything relating to yours; and then, it wasn't guaranteed that a years-old problem got fixed.
If I have an issue with my Mac, seeing an Apple Discussions result at the top readies me for disappointment.
Meanwhile, I've found a normal chat with current ChatGPT to be very helpful, as long as it isn't about itself or other OpenAI products.
hedora•May 28, 2026
If you love AI mode, then won't you just use a chat app? That'll search Google for you, and it'll keep more context, use a better model, etc, etc.
When people open a search bar and type stuff, they're showing an incredibly strong intent to... search the web.
This reminds me of when MS tried to turn all Windows user interactions into bing, or (even worse) copilot. How did that work out for them?
Anyway, unlike windows, there's zero cost to switch away from Google's search product. I'm predicting a bigger backfire.
pmdr•May 28, 2026
Alternative search engines are popular with the tech/HN bubble. Other than Bing, they have no palpable market share. Google does not care about said bubble because it mostly overlaps people who would use an adblocker anyway and who are capable of finding their way around other for-profit restrictions (i.e. downloading videos with yt-dlp instead of paying for YT Premium).
DDG has <1% market share, so +28%, while encouraging, means nothing for the monopoly. I use it. I use Brave Search as well. Paid for Kagi for a while.
But getting people to use anything other than Google (or the default Bing for on Windows) is nearly impossible at scale.
4rachelp•May 28, 2026
in case this point hasn't been made -- what was the baseline for the 28% more visits? duckduck go has like 1-2% search share. So, if there is even a small group of opinionated users who flee google, that would make a big difference. We can't conclude as a result that everyone hates the AI push.
99 Comments
I personally have had to use DuckDuckGo to search for things that Gemini finds to be against its instructions to answer.
And I'm not talking about things that are NSFW, but some things that Gemini just doesn't want to discuss.
That's kinda Gemini's problem in general, it just is overly restrictive and doesn't like to talk about anything things that Claude will freely talk about and push against and discuss with you.
For other things, Grok is quite fast — Perplexity too
The corresponding "AI overview" feature of Gmail is amazing. It digests the messages that match your search. Because it is using your own docs, the output is way better. Or, at least, mine is. Maybe your inbox is full of lies but mine isn't.
If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
Just because Google used to do search as their main point of business does not mean that holds true today. Holding on to the false premise will only add to your confusion about their decisions.
Couple that with the fact that a lot of folks have moved their search to GPT or Claude once those platforms start taking in ad money... that budget will come from somewhere and that's likely existing Google ad buy dollars shifting.
Could you elaborate on this? What ad company did Google buy?
Ads make the money, but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there. It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.
I’m always surprised by how much people are still searching for stuff as we’ve moved from the open web to various platforms (Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, etc), but every time I see Google’s revenue breakdown I’m shocked by just how important Search still is to their business.
This is from 2024, but shows Search accounting for nearly 57% of revenue. Yes, this is made possible by the AdWords business, but without Search, that 57% goes away, unless that traffic goes to a 3rd party that is also using AdWords and Google were to make the same from 3rd party ads as 1st party. I find that doubtful.
https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/google-revenue-break...
Which is kind of the scary hazard for Google. They made people notice search by their announcements. They drew attention to the thing people took for granted as just how things work. People suddenly have a reason to look critically at it. Google has to hope to god the attention they receive back is actually positive.
I've found it hilarious that every single search engine does the same thing. You can do it even in Apple's App Store too. (Not seeing the scam I'm talking about? Search a few more times, it'll hit) How does anyone see this as anything but a scam? User clicks the ad? Get paid. User clicks the search result? No pay. Either way, the user gets the same experience. But why the fuck should any company pay for an ad when the user explicitly searched for their product? It's metric hacking. I mean what's their next move? Down rank the explicit result? When making more money requires degrading the product you know we've fucked up
It would be a shame if someone else got the top result
Do you see an ad when you search for ebay? I don't.
eBay stopped paying for placement on the term "ebay" more than a decade ago, and I believe the executive who made that call got a bonus. It's possible of course that they changed their mind later, but since there still isn't an ad on the term today, I suspect they didn't.
(Methodology: I opened Microsoft Edge, where I have no addons or adblocking or anything installed, went to google.com, and searched for "ebay". There are no ads in the results panel. There is a sidebar with some non-sponsored information provided; below that sidebar is a section saying "people also search for" that mentions Etsy, Shopify, Poshmark, and Mercari. That section isn't sponsored either.
As a point of comparison, I also searched for "mortgage loans". (Same window, new tab, google.com.) On that search, there is no informational sidebar, and the results panel begins with a section called "Sponsored Results" which occupies the entire vertical extent of the browser window. (And consists of all of four links, with blurbs.) Below the sponsored results is the AI overview, and below that are the genuine results.)
It was an example. You're getting lost in the weeds. Similar to this saying BuT sOmEoNe ElSe WiLl GeT tHe ToP sPoT
If you don't buy out the top-place for the query, someone else will. In a better case a competitor - imagine Facebook Marketplace being the top result for "ebay". In the worst - a phishing site. The latter happens quite often for software searches.
Right, but you know what's even more effective than ads in search? Biased (towards paying customers) information in LLM output.
AI is going to be great at pushing ads. Plus AI trains you to give google even more control. Instead of just presenting you with a list of websites offering different perspectives and opinions on something, Google can just tell you what they want you to know/think (or not tell you anything they'd rather you not know/think about). The more you get used to treating google like an oracle instead of a librarian the easier it will be to manipulate you.
You ask AI for a product recommendation. It says "Buy X from Acme". Is that paid product placement? Who knows?
I'm a bit afraid that although AI is being presented as part of the carrot, it may actually be a shittier stick.
My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they have fear of missing out on AI :(
That's been my experience too, both with friends and coworkers.
It would seem that the negative sentiment around AI is largely an internet phenomenon. I've yet to run into a hardcore "AI skeptic" irl. People seem either neutral, or enthusiastic about it.
I use AI a lot. But I’m specifically looking for ways it actually ads value.
(I don't know anybody that is actually more productive because of it, but I know people that consistently use it successfully in small tasks.)
I also know people afraid it will make all code worse and their jobs a nightmare. It's harder to find those people because they don't say it out loud, but there are plenty who think this way.
I know it's only anecdata, but it's one data point.
I'm a tech startup co-founder able to avoid all the bullshit around it and just build stuff. My favourite part is that I can go through the planning part, get a decent plan for the build together, and then go do something else while the LLM builds it. It also really helps with maker/manager time because the LLM is keeping the context, not me, so if I'm interrupted I don't lose track of everything and have to reload context.
He also tries to troubleshoot/debug stuff without calling me... and just asking me to choose right path offered by AI. I love it :) Because I usually make people wait and don't have much time outside my business hours to do additional tech stuff.
Could be correct, could be not, who cares?
Personally, I like it sometimes, but I'm a techie and understand the limitations, and I dislike not being given options to use or not use it.
1. Labor replacement
2. AI is actually bad in-and-of-itself. Doesn't work, not useulf etc.
3. Energy concerns
I wonder how many still say they have a negative sentiment on AI yet are still paying customers.
I have no issues with the technology itself.
(I didn't quickly find polls for the rest of the world)
I wonder how many in that poll have a negative sentiment about AI, yet are also heavy users. There seems to be some kind of disconnect going on?
Being a heavy user seems like it'd create a lot of resentment if you don't actually enjoy doing it.
If you have used a tool for years and years and suddenly it shoves in a bunch of AI, like Duolingo or Google, are you a heavy user who may well dislike the results?
I have to put in some work to not be a heavy user by any reasonable definition.
People have all sorts of concerns about how AI will change society, but that's precisely because it's so useful for so many things. If it were useless or just a fad, there would be no reason to worry.
Less than 10% in our case :)
Heck, I haven't even downloaded the ChatGPT app, but I use their website all the time.
AI use has taken off, and a large fraction of the population is using it regularly, if their own accord.
Then it became so common to be a techy person and surround yourself with other techy people that it was easy to fall into a bubble and not realize it. When all of your news websites, coworkers, social media feeds, and friends in the group chat all think the same thing it feels like everyone in the world agrees with you.
You see it whenever social media topics come up. On Hacker News there’s never ending confusion about how Facebook continues to exist because the common refrain is “nobody uses Facebook any more”. Leave the tech bubble, though, and Facebook has a massive number of active users and activity. Whenever I mention this it gets doubted, denied, or even dismissed as lies from Meta trying to inflate their stock price. The dismissals always come from people who proudly deleted their Facebook account ten years ago and therefore have no idea what happens on Facebook, of course.
One of my favorite comment sections this year was when a lot of people were recounting how their aunt or cousin or grandma used Facebook and actually enjoyed it, which attracted comments saying they must be a rare outlier. It just goes too much against the bubble consensus that everyone hates Facebook and has a bad time when they use it.
FWIW I think it's a combo of people who spend all their time in online circles and and the effect on upvote sites where people try to appeal to the group sentiment to farm for votes. There's a lot of tech communities that consist of people who pretty much don't socialize in person and it was greatly exacerbated by the pandemic.
One of my friend ended up spending too much time on Candy AI or some sort of AI companion thingy :/
I’ve tried using the homepage method before with Kagi, as the extension to set it as the default search is a pretty ugly hack. I found it created too much friction, as I’m often searching from an existing page.
All conventions and user centricity go out the window with AI feature launches lately. If you look at examples from the last week it’s stuff like posthogs opt-out training, Copilot training, or Google’s antigravity chat-app switch.
I’ve had the worst customer experiences of my life in the last few months.
My health insurance company decided calling support meant I consented to them saving my voice for model training. They said you can opt-out online, but that option didn’t exist in app or on their website. It was only after calling back and threatening to sue that they added an option to opt-out.
This is the daily experience now. Seemingly every company is opting you into selling your data, breaking your workflows, disabling features you use, and force installing AI integrations you have to fight to remove. And several companies are perfectly fine to reenable or reinstall them after removal.
It should be no surprise to anyone people are mad.
What real value AI does have has been poisoned by premature rollouts (training users it’s crap) and forcing it on people too aggressively.
If this isn’t how it works, I’d be interested to know. The whole idea of these opt-outs seem like smoke and mirrors to act good while still gaining the advantage from the dark pattern. The only way to truly opt-out is to not register or use a service at all. There really needs to be legislation around this.
Of all the reports I've submitted (evidence included) followups and fines have been issued to exactly 0 companies. Hell, Quadlock [phone mount company] happily acknowledged that their policy is to verify identity by requesting plain emails including photocopies of the credit card used for purchase and full state ID. Absolutely against regs.. who cares? Not the SCC nor the FTC.
Noyb alone has several hundred successful GDPR lawsuits: https://noyb.eu/en/project/cases
Disregarding that, laws don't apply to the first processing party only. If you keep data, that you got informed are not consented to anymore, it is the same as if you keep selling fenced goods.
>I’ve had the worst customer experiences of my life in the last few months.
I attribute that to the massive amount of tax breaks and money that has been funneled to them by various governments. The government is the customer that they are appeasing right now. As soon as the spigot is turned off, they will be more inclined to appease us.
I do not know the consumer or b2b AI market well right now. I do know that billions of dollars are at stake from government sources. A smart company would focus on that.
The government does procure services from private firms, this isn't new or special.
I think to some degree, that effect is also at play here. CEOs, product managers etc are simply amazed, and want to spread the good news. I doubt they can even _comprehend_ that others might not be as excited as them.
I'll believe it when I see it.
At least he's not one of the many mooks who are doing ChatGPT-assisted (Grok-assisted?) blogging and boasting about it, even when it goes wrong, like Casey Handmer.
It should seriously be 100% illegal to force someone's content into AI training without their explicit consent, and no not opting out should not be an escape hatch.
It is insane, and I hate modernity and every single modern product that just shoves random LLM crap at you and pretend they are not AI-enabled.
If you care about music just a little bit you should stop using it today and directly buy music from the artists you care about.
What for? Just use the website via your favourite browser.
Their friend are probably the kind of people conflating Chrome/Google with "The Internet"
And I think on Android its even less clear the distinction between the browser app and "Google"
Too late, people have started moving. They have to act fast to stop the migration from growing.
So I'm wondering how other folks are finding this out.
Won’t be surprised if Google thinks their Golden Goose is terminally ill and AI is the replacement.
Google is really an information provider powered by ads. That’s what people use their search for - to get information.
Google’s search basically has the internet as its backend - information-wise. I think it’s inevitable that AI slop (output from low quality GenAI) will render it useless eventually.
So Google’s solution is to build their own AI with information curated by them to try to stay the front page of the internet.
I’m getting extremely annoyed by the Base44 ads I see on YouTube every other video.
First I pressed skip all the time, but the ads keep popping up. So now, every time I see it, I click on the ad and then immediately close the site. At least I can make their aggressive ad strategy a bit more expensive.
What I see is people using AI of their own free will, because it's incredibly useful.
It's true that inside tech companies, AI is being pushed into products, but outside of those companies, normal people are rapidly adopting AI for all sorts of daily uses.
"I don't know what this symbol on my dishwasher means." -> Ask AI.
"Why is my bread not rising properly?" -> Ask AI.
These are the types of things that previously would have taken a lot longer to figure out, but that you can get an immediate answer to with AI. That's the fundamental reason why it's taking off. Not because it's being pushed.
Even if it's only able to report facts from its dataset or perform simple synthesis of search results.
That it can actually reason to a certain extent is bonus points.
Their "AI" bullshit did in fact push me to finally make DuckDuckGo my default page. Happy to hear others are switching too.
we have moments like this every few years (almost as frequent as crypto waves in recent memory), but they keep chugging along.
couple years back it was all about saying the GPTs have replaced search for people and how google is dead. now when they implement the same, it drives people away.
i can imagine how it can be difficult to be in their shoes, when any change is met with negativity. no surprise that the core interface has...had not changed all this time.
context: left to ddg almost a decade ago in a similar exodus wave.
The other day I googled "I'll be resolving" in quotation marks as I usually do when I'm unsure if it's idiomatic (or grammatically correct for that matter) English.
AI mode replied with: "I'm on it. Tell me what you're working on, and I'll jump right in with the exact steps, scripts, or details you need to tackle it! What exactly are you looking to resolve?"
Just give me the damn phrase used in a sentence along with the number of results so that I can assess how common this expression is.
This include work.
I use DDG, kagy and the LLM du jour .
Again, no friction. No plan. No transition période. I just changed the default search engine on a whim.
While Google has certainly failed with their products before, by and large as a company they are "too big to fail" at this point so to speak where the myriad products they offer have become a very significant part of the digital infrastructure on which much of the world runs.
Anecdotally I've also switched to DuckDuckGo in the past because I didn't want Google looking over my shoulder on my browsing history (this was pre-AI), but I ended up coming back because I felt the search results weren't quite as good (or perhaps it was just in my head, and the differing UI was enough to throw me off).
And this may be a contrarian opinion, and while I hate the idea of Google mining all of my data and monetizing it, I actually find value in the AI 'previews' that Google provides (and will often ask it follow up questions as a means of getting 'free' LLM responses back for 'easier' prompts that I don't want to burn Claude tokens on).
A lot of people keep saying this, and yet I never saw a reasonable example. Whenever DDG fails for me, the Google's results are even worse.
Some people can love AI mode while others hate it.
why bother fiddling with url parameters or switching entire browsers when you can just go to one of many other search sites?
this is just an ad for brave being disguised as something 'helpful'.
https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
The only Google service I haven't been able to replace is YouTube - no real alternative. I still use Google Maps as well, but could probably switch to Apple maps without missing much. For hiking trails, Apple Maps has often been superior. I briefly tried OpenStreetMaps years ago, but the lack of traffic data and the fact that it gave me bad directions made it untenable.
I would say it's more than visits that count, how many people are staying in the DDG or Google home page doing things? a lot more with Google I'd think. they've succeeded in trapping me in their product, instead of navigating away, and I'm happier for it. And... i still don't get what people's problem is (quality wise that is), you don't have to use AI results right, and it's pretty obvious what the AI interaction portion of the page is? I'm sure ad blocker extensions can remove it entirely as well. DDG's quality is not just lower, it requires me clicking around to get AI assisted summary.
I just don't get it, is people's time not valuable? even if half the time the AI results are wrong, it offsets (for me - and it's more like 5%) the time I waste clicking on random sites, some of them ad-trodden (where a blocker isn't available), outdated,etc.. and I usually don't even go to the second page of the result where as the AI reviews more than the first page or two to give me a summary. I'm saving lots and lots of time, getting more done with it.
This is tech, not religion, but it feels like people are conflating the two. it's just a tool that's used to search things.
For as much as how the startup space loves to pay lip service to contrarian bets, people sure do all be running in the same direction.
https://marginalia-search.com/
I'm sure the model is fine, but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. If I wanted to ask an AI, why can't I ask the one from my subscription... that I'm already paying for... that's actually good... that can also search the web?
I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
Users aren't adopting their AI at the rate shareholders expect, so they now force the adoption at the cost of search.
>Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. As people have realized just how much more Search can do for them, they’re searching more than ever before — so much so that last quarter, we saw queries reach an all-time high.
>Another place where we’ve been rapidly innovating is in the Gemini app. Last year at I/O, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today, we’ve surpassed 900 million, more than doubling in a year. In that same time, daily requests have grown over seven times.
No, it's not. AI mode is something you have to select (in the search window). There is an AI overview provided with your basic search results.
That's what I get, in the UK, logged out of Google, from a search in Firefox omnibar using "Google" as provider.
I'm aware that they have other things that can be described as AI modes.
AI Mode in that screenshot is the tab to the left of All.
I wonder how much the search results thing is related to language and locality. I have a hunch but I haven't really dug into it.
I live in the US, I speak English, and my browser is normally chrome.
The number of times I've gone to the 2nd page in Google search results you can probably count on one hand in the last 15yr or so.
I use the standard Google search things when I want specifics... Using quotes, site:news.ycombinator.com to search a site, or add a "-" to remove results from that site. I use a "+" when needed. Nothing fancy.
When people say they can't find things in Google search, I'm genuinely baffled. I have a strong suspicion that it has something to do with the combination of browser, locality, and language. Why? Could be tons of reasons for that, some probably anti-competitive on the browser side.
I have tried to use ecosia, start page, duckduckgo, etc. Was never happy with those results and always ended up back at Google search.
I just want to know what's different, you know? I look up some pretty obscure stuff sometimes.
Note: I do normally have my Google account logged in in the browser when doing search, however I have search personalization and history turned off, so that should not be influencing the quality of my search results compared to whatever "baseline" is.
Regular people are/were really bad at using google, so google moved towards showing what it thinks you want rather than what you want. They paved over the skill gap between people who understood keywords and word order, and people who just typed in a quasi legible sentence to find something. In doing so though, they killed a lot of skill that people had developed with google for years.
Basically they made the game worse for pros so it could be better for amateurs. I have never heard a non-tech person complain about google getting worse over the years, and they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.
Citation needed. A hard push to change their search offering, sure. To improve it? Well, if by improve you mean 'require more interaction and viewing of more adverts on average before leaving' ...
I would bet all of my money that you never once did a Google search (pre-LLM mania, but maybe even after) that looked like
"What kind of clothing is best for when you are going hiking around the lake, so my feet don't get so cold?"
Sadly, this is how most humans have used a search engine for decades now.
And you frequently ended up finding a discussion forum with around that question and relevant discussion under it.
Forum hiking warm socks backpacking trail running
Which was basically a structured programmatic query that activated the old google algo just right.
Was I the frog in the pot and now I'm cooked? I don't feel like in search Google any different from maybe 2005 or so.
Hard agree. The only thing I've ever witnessed another person do on Google (this is only an incredibly slight exaggeration) is:
1. Type a 'query' - either a brand/website name or some kind of stream of thought like "dishwasher error 03F" (without quotes)
2. Click or look at the very top thing in the results.
This used to mean 80% of the time they'd click the top ad, 20% the top organic result. Then they started putting non-clickable "answers" in that top spot, which would always be accepted as 'the right answer'. When those appeared, approximately no one would ever click any 'blue links.' These started out pretty reliable because they were just direct extracts from sites like IMDB: "Brad Pitt is 44 years old" etc.
Now it's like 60% of the time an ad, 40% of the time their bargain-basement-model "AI Overview" slop. Either way, approximately all users always just use whatever is on top and ignore everything else.
Wtf
Technically, all the people who google "how do I disable this shitty AI mode in google" would count as "driving an increase in total search queries."
An easy way to make a feature popular is to force it on everyone. Then you can pat yourself on the back when 100% of your users are using it!
I'm not entirely sure I'm buying that, unless users keep prompting the AI to reduce the amount of reading they need to do. Sort of interrogating the AI, rather than reading a Wikipedia page.
Rather than "users don't find what they want with the AI as easily so they have to spend longer with it"
People have many more questions in their life than they do queries.
Most non technical people I know asked questions to Google even before the AI overview. Instead of looking for the answer in seo-bloated articles, they find it in the overview.
I think google should improve in detecting the kind of query when I need a link that I don't remember, and deactivate the overview on those. If I search for "ryanair booking" I clearly need the url for booking a Ryanair flight, AI overview is useless
If programmers and engineers are saying "why would anyone want that?", odds are the product will be a gigantic success.
Of course they have more AI queries every day. They have full control over what goes to LLMs and what doesn't.
If the results are garbage, or people have difficulty with it... Of course number of searches goes up. That doesn't mean the product is better or its not resulting in brand damage.
I search more when I cant find the thing I am looking for. I search less when I find the thing I am looking for.
Second, it takes additional effort to not do AI search.
...and it really hasn't been for a good number of years now. I left a while ago when results were all SEO copy pasta blogs this is just a final nail in the coffin.
Because Google wants to kill off its search engine here. It is very clear.
> I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
This assumes that Google search is still a high priority for Google. With their privatized adNetwork, they are trying to get people to trust them, and abuse users via their ads. That is their business model. Google is an adCompany. It stopped being a tech company many years ago already.
Also they control the adMarket for the most part. Just look at youtube.
They killed their competition and now they will give you the product that gives them the most money.
They believe they won’t be wrong for long.
I think this is a step beyond that - why should people be creating cooking websites when you can ask LLM how to cook given thing, while indeed, serving their own ads. It's the continuation of "we own content other people produce" policy
Can you really though? Are the results delicious? I've never tried that.
That being said, an LLM can give creative ideas, mix and match components, but you should not trust the details at all.
The computer generated recipes can be useful as inspiration, but of course common sense is required.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
~ Charles Babbage
Okay, so you don't trust LLM, so you go to a website instead. And... LLM-generated pages are SEO'd to get the top links. So you can't trust any website now (shoot, so much nonsense even before LLM, just more obvious to some of us). So basically everything on a computer is untrustworthy, directly from an LLM or not, unless you got yourself a copy of Encarta '97.
So you pick up a book at the local library. Librarians picked some books to order in subject matters they aren't expert in. How do you know those are accurate and safe? If the book says to use rice starch glue, how do you know the author didn't just copy that from an LLM? Or make it up?
Trust is fading entirely.
The thing is, these things do produce some kind of result that looks like what you want. But it is still up to you to test these things on a project before you rely on them for whatever it is you really wanted them for, and that requirement doesn't go away just because you sourced the information from some LLM, or a book at the library, or Nick Offerman, or whoever else.
AI got better over the last couple of years, and you didn't keep up, and because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.
> because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.
How? Will it stop being possible to cook without AI?
That's like saying the fundamental technology behind an Egger-Lohner Hybrid and a Prius are the same. Technically true, but if you use that truth as a basis for decisionmaking, you're doomed. A modern AI model wouldn't make such a foolish mistake, so you'd better not make it yourself.
You can - but it's not advisable, not in the least.
there are other such goodies like mashed potatoes with broken lightbulb gravy, or fiberglass omelette, enjoyed by beldar conehead.
i wouldnt trust an AI for any recipe that i dont have personal experience with.
the safety rails are not very strong yet.
Point is, unless you're stupid enough to add glue or broken glass to your meal just because a recipe told you to, it's perfectly safe. More than just safe, LLM recipes these days are utterly boring in their normalacy, and, unlike cookbook recipes, can dynamically adapt to what you actually have in your pantry.
I could see LLMs being helpful to explore what's out there, like finding similar dishes or dishes involving a specific set of ingredients or dishes involving a particular technique, but a pretty poor tool for the actual technicalities of cooking or more importantly the uniquely personal aspects of food culture.
I dunno. I'd just buy larousse and on food and cooking.
I'll stick with my mom's handwritten recipe book.
And I think the rest of it will end the same way. People will be significantly less eager to do all that free work when no one will be able to find it.
Block Googlebot from your sites.
Let's go back to webrings.
Though that's not to say they're acting altruisticly here.
Google seems to be racing toward a new dark pattern where users learn to trust rely on the AI for neutral, smart objectively correct answers — which boosts trust in its sponsored product recommendations. Super gross.
So now you're trusting them to provide the cure?
Like the parent I use good/paid AI when I want an AI response. So, yeah, an omnibox that knows when I want "an answer" and one that knows when I want to find a thing sounds slightly more convenient than switching between two tools, but Google search is not that Omnibox.
Not me. I really appreciate having both results simultaneously. I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great. I can expand it to see if there's more.
Or, if I see that the AI mode didn't understand my brief search query, I just glance at the search results below.
And often times, when I do need to follow a link, I find the source result links in the AI mode to be a better quality than the search result links.
It's the best of both worlds.
But how do make the determination that the answer is good and you should stop reading the page? Vibes?
Well before Google screwed it all up there used to be some correlation between top hits and what you were looking for. SEO has muddied the waters for many years now and it’s never been truly “merit based” or “objective” or whatever we want to call it, but generally speaking, the first results were the best by default.
SEO optimization totally ruined google search for me for the past few years
Ok, but it’s been mine. And clearly I’m not alone.
I feel like at this point any discussion about LLM’s has an implied “my experience” because LLM’s are super inconsistent due to not being refined tools at all. I’m sure your experience has been different, just like my experience has been different. I imagine you’ll want to chalk it up to operator error, but it sure seems like a lot of people have variations of my experience. If so many people are operating it wrong, then maybe the tool is poorly designed.
Understand that I use LLM’s pretty frequently. I am not “anti-AI.” I’ve used production tools incorporating machine learning for years now. But LLM’s simply aren’t the bespoke tools that these companies want you to believe, and they are definitely not a suitable replacement for search. It’s simply too inconsistent and will hallucinate answers. Google search didn't make up answers, it presented indexed sources that you ver in real time which I find to be a far superior way to do research. I don’t like having to guess when an LLM is just making shit up as it asserts something with simulated extreme confidence. Not only that, you can take a correct answer from a LLM and just start saying “know that is not right,” and it will start apologizing to you and generating other answers. That is a huge problem! I shouldn’t be able to “convince it” to give me a different answer.
Yes SEO made things objectively worse. Doesn’t mean we need to add another layer of issues on top of that.
Most of the time I'm looking for something very specific that there are plenty of articles about, but clicking on the articles results in popups, banners and an unhealthy amount of scrolling to get to the answer.
AI overview provides me the answer instantly.
Think about suff like "does china borders afghanistan". In those cases you can be confident that the AI overview is right, and saved you time.
If it is a complex or niche question I tend not to trust the overview and go straight for legitimate-looking results
The same way I make the determination as to whether a linked search result is good and I don't need to click on another search result.
It's not like non-AI webpages are inherently more trustworthy or anything. The internet is full of misinformation everywhere, you know?
1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down. 2. "AI everywhere!" put them in a panic, so they shoved am LLM into results, hoping it could pick through bad results and give good data to the user. 3. LLMs are expensive to run, so they're using a cheap model.
Cheap model + bad results = abysmal user experience.
There are too many groups with opposed interests fighting. Ad groups wants worse results so people search more (not realizing this just drives users away). Search groups want a better product so they stop losing users, and the AI group is being given a bad name because management is using their worst AI product on search. So the whole experience is just garbage.
Why would this work? Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?
Humans are predictable and hate change. For a short while it DOES work, people are used to great results, assume they're not using the the best keywords, and they'll reformulate their searches. For a while. After a while of all searches being not as good as they used to be, people start looking for other alternatives, which is why DDG is seeing an uptick.
It's called enshittification. It's easier than improving a product.
> Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?
No idea.
The platform has been various kinds of hostile for a few years now
"AI" gets higher volume of use than search. This was disclosed by Google under oath
More traffic, more usage time, more data collection
https://www.wired.com/story/even-if-you-hate-ai-you-will-use...
Slight digression: Claude/ChatGPT/etc all can search the web, but Google's AI already has a local copy of the web. It's much faster because of Google's TPUs, but also because Google has a copy of almost the entire web available locally. I recall others testing this and they observe that Google doesn't actually make HTTP requests to sites it references. It just uses its local cache. That's an advantage that all others seem to lack.
Of course, I agree that when I want search, I want search. But personally I've found if I want an LLM to very quickly answer a simple question, the type of thing all of them would do an equally good job on, I prefer Google's for its sheer speed.
Because the goal is not to provide the best answers.
It's for users to train their AI.
Like you, I use both search and AI separately. Even casual, nontechnical users are starting to work like that. Including AI with traditional search results will keep a lot of users from jumping ship in the first place and will help win back users from ChatGPT.
I know a lot of people hate AI - at a minimum, there’s a vocal minority - but the reality is AI is eating search like nothing we’ve ever seen.
To each their own.
google pushed it into their other products to attract people to AI
there was and still are a decent number of people who haven't really used it, as crazy as that sounds
If I truly want to search I will ignore the llm results, but I like the convenience of a quick llm search that knows "all the things". I get the answer to my question without searching multiple ad-ridden websites (since the ad provider does all the things)
> The DuckDuckGo mobile app saw installs spike in the US by 18.1% on average compared to the previous week. TechCrunch reported this growth was sustained over six days, peaking at 30.5% on May 25. An even greater number of iOS users hit download on the app though, with installs seeing an average week-on-week growth of 33% and a peak of 69.9%.
Why do they report only relative numbers? These numbers alone are meaningless. This is just lazy reporting.
Random snapshot of what it looked like: https://web.archive.org/web/20220101023001/https://duckduckg...
You look it up.
I'll bing it.
I'll brave it.
I'll ecosia it.
I'll kagi it.
I'll startpage it.
I'll yandex it.
Okay "I'll brave it" does sound fine, especially in our brave new world, but it's still ambiguous when speaking it.
Of course DDG / others can do the exact same thing as they already have an AI mode. Maybe you can even set up ChatGPT as a search engine - not sure. The key for this use case is speed - it has to be nearly instant.
The problem is that's not discoverable though. The toggle on google.com would be nice but most people probably arent searching that way.
This is the exact use-case, and it makes a lot of sense. The hard part for Google is identifying when someone wants search and when someone wants an AI response. It's somewhat identifiable by the input but of course thats extremely messy to determine systematically.
And a "?" at the end is not going to capture a lot of real LLM prompts like "What should I pack for my vaction? Im going to Florida in September."
I mean you could do something like this. But it's really not much different than other manual search codes that are used by more power users like like "", "site:" etc.
They probably have a term for it but their AI response is just another "embedded result" for lack of a better term. Like displaying the local weather directly at the top when you search "weather", etc.
I recently bought a Bambu 3d printer after Reddit/HN drew my attention to them and AI mode has been really useful for me to learn about my new printer and troubleshoot things. There is so much information and I don't have time to read everything. I just want to ask a targeted question and have something summarize the literature's answers for it.
It will be a sad day when Google inevitably enshittifies it, but for now I'm happy for them to subsidize my expensive LLM queries.
"I wish I'd supported the crazy folks who did carrot science in public and distributed seeds and allowed everyone to breed them so that we could all find better varieties for the common good! They still seem to be eating well."
(I see your very practical point, but I do think making the locally suboptimal choice in the hope of better long-term outcomes is a valid philosophical position.)
But if they're letting me using AI for free without logging in and I just need a dumb AI slop answer, then I'm more than happy to burn their tokens instead of my own. Any serious work goes to a different LLM provider. The switching cost for moving to a different LLM provider in the future is practically zero.
That was essentially how people praised Google in their early days. It certainly has ads now.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
But if you still want ChatGPT/Claude, then you simply create a custom bang and associate it with something like `https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s`
So now in your address bar you type "how to center a div !gpt" and it will start a session with your query
I'm among the people who finally moved to DuckDuckGo as my default. And for the occasional time when I want some AI mode I know how to get to Google.
I love Google's AI answers and their AI Mode tab. DDG is just Bing or a search vendor proxy, so I've never understood the fascination. At least Perplexity is different to Google. DDG seeing a 28% increase is like Google saying they saw a drop of 0.0000000001% in traffic.
HN crowd forget that the world isn't like us, they didn't grow up with Yahoo and Alta Vista, with Excite etc etc. Our SOP is to resist all change, anytime Apple brings out a new version it'll be the end of Apple according to HN - Apple - the biggest company in the world - what do they know about UI, "Liquid Glass sucks!" :) :)
We're a community in danger of pushing out those new to the tech world, recent graduates will be made to feel unwelcome if we continue to trash everything that the biggest companies in the world do, like we always know better. I implore the community to be more positive about the future, about the technologies that will take us into that future.
And supposing these technologies do take us into the future: when said future is bleak and worse in most ways than what came before, people aren't going to be encouraged or enthusiastic about the tech world.
Don't you have to do that _anyway_? Unless you're just blindly trusting the AI to be correct, and if that's the case, please do enjoy gluing your cheese to your pizza.
I'm also finding that the AI-cited links are often more helpful and authoritative than the top search results.
How do you know the answer is exact?
> or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
Where do you think that "exact answer" is being scraped and averaged-out from?
This reads as a strongly closed minded claim that has been "whitewashed into corporate appropriate speech" by an llm. If you cannot understand any validity to the other side of a debate then you are not engaging in discussion, no matter how your claims are dressed up.
Its search results ordering is quite good, but the accessible information for them seems to be shrinking. And quickly.
I’m at the point where I don’t search for complex things anymore. I use Kagi for things which can be found with any search engines. Not because I chose it, but because I was forced. This was not the case a few years back, when I started to use it.
Btw, there was one thing with which Google was superior all along: define <word>. And they fucking killed it in the past months, for a far, far worse solution. Nothing comes even close.
For the search, some of the local results are wrong but I live in a very small area so it may be more reliable for highly populated areas. Lately I've been checking out Kagi for a few things just to see what the quality is like on competition. The anonymized chat (proxy) for AI is cool but very small context limit. Good for looking up random questions and they typically include references.
DuckDuckGo was also useless. Qwant just copy/pastes Google's awful UI.
We kind of see that all search engines suck now, but in many cases there is no real reason why that should be the case. For instance, why did Qwant copy/paste Google's horrible UI? There is no logical reason for this other than trying to bait in people who like the Google search UI. I don't like that UI Google chose since like 10 years or more; Google ruined its search engine already way before AI.
We really need a search engine that works and isn't control by a greedy, Evil adCompany. DDG isn't the answer; neither is Qwant.
Classic example of misleading with stats.
Google's search volume has been growing 12%+ per year for 20+ years, there's obviously much more room for volatility when you're smaller...
Recently I switched to Kagi and has been a very happy customer. I never visited Google after that. Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone.
However, I find that most of my queries don't require Google to find the result. Maybe once every couple days I do a search, don't like the results, and then add a "!g". Most of the time it's fine and I get to avoid Google's ecosystem.
Google search had degraded so badly pre-AI, I was already finding it equivalent for most things. The odd few searches benefit from Google, but nowhere near enough to warrant them as a default.
I just have Kagi set a custom search engine in mobile browser - no seperate app needed.
https://kagi.com/search?q=%s
The google live scores is a great feature. But when it's not coming up, even googling "french open google live scores" doesn't just bring it up every single time. It might if you try, but try multiple times over the day...
So, from 3 to 4 people?
You can add a custom search engine to your browser with something like:
Sometimes that will glitch out on Chromium browsers. If so, try this variant:Some Googling claims DDG gets 145M searches per day and claims Google gets ~14B. Well, 14B translates to ~162k QPS. I know for a fact that Google's traffic is significantly higher than that so I'm not sure where that claim comes from.
I honeslty don't believe a significant percentage of Google users even know Sundar made a statement about people loving AI mode or would even care, one way or the other. This is just more marketing fluff trying to will DDG growth into existence.
AI Overviews are pretty bad though.
Also sorry!
Also why is AI mode default?
A ~30% jump of DuckDuckGo is about 0.3% of global search traffic, basically a rounding error for google.
Still, it's an interesting signal, but not nearly enough to worry Google. If the jump had been 300% that would merit some thought.
I don’t have to click through a load of cookie banners and login popups to see it.
- Search ad pricing is inelastic and auction based (supply goes down price goes up).
- A jump in traffic to DuckDuckGo does not mean Google is experiencing a decline in search volume. Number of queries per session has increased since launching AI Overviews.
False. Advertisers have budgets and ROI targets. If Google cannot compete people will get their clicks elsewhere.
> A jump in traffic to DuckDuckGo does not mean Google is experiencing a decline in search volume. Number of queries per session has increased since launching AI Overviews.
But it does produce lower ROI for advertisers (in this case: CTR goes down because my ad is being shown to more people). Once user is on my landing page, my conversion rate is fine month on month (±1%), but my CTR on google got sharply worse by 5% since, and if it goes much further I'll stop completely on Google.
I doubt I am alone: Maybe others will jump ship sooner and the price will recover (demand goes down) but in either event Google is less net revenue, and given how aggressive their sales pushes have been I think it could be that big
There's a local search engine with a motto that translates to something like "Find what you don't know." Google has seemingly adapted "find what you don't want."
A large fraction of the people using Google probably have no idea DDG exists. So the backlash is likely significantly larger than just the 0.2% who left to this search engine.
But recently I had an entertaining experience with it. I was trying to apply a math technique to an application it wasn't normally used for, and I figured that somewhere out there was a paper or two explaining how to do what I was attempting. So, I tried Googling, and the response was something like:
"You appear to be working with two completely different areas of mathematics, which have absolutely no connections between them. That's fascinating! Would you like to know more about either of these two completely separated subjects which have nothing to do with each other?"
Not useful, Google, but definitely good for a laugh.
Of course, asking it to give yes/no answers or specific numbers is asking for trouble, but finally I can let something else read the SEOed garbage, point me in the right direction and let me browse the search results in a much more pleasant way than before.
The DDG one is good, useful
http://kagi2pv5bdcxxqla5itjzje2cgdccuwept5ub6patvmvn3qgmgjd6...
(from https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/accessing-via-tor...)
For example, DDG puts it in the content-security-policy header
But it is still shit compared to a search engine. Which Google no longer is.
There’s a real opening for actual search engines now.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
When will people learn that the quality of Google’s leadership is better than that of the average Joe on Hacker News or a random tech journalist writing clickbait articles?
But your 2nd paragraph is spot on.
The header and input bars are too big. The max width of the response is too narrow. The font is too large. The way it renders onto the page feels weirdly clunky. There is a whole sidebar in addition to the top bar just for two buttons. In the + button under user input, they hide everything under there like model selection even though there's a ton of real estate to the right of it. Everything feels unnecessarily cramped on the page in spite of ridiculous amounts of whitespace.
Yet my ultimate dislike feels like something more than the sum of the parts. It feels like the Yahoo of AI. Anyone not relying on distribution advantages would know they need to do better.
It really speaks to Google's perennial weakness: they can never seem to make an incredible UX.
I don't think that's because they are better search engines, but because their usage covers 99% of my queries and some AI like perplexity covers the remaining 1%.
The flip side is that multiple AI Search engines have overtaken and lapped DuckDuckGo many many times over in the past year or so.
Even if the backend is bing, they have somehow made it work. It's is a weird bonus for Microsoft.... If they don't try to copy google they can finally get some search market share!
LOL.
Hopefully this will inspire new teams to create indexed based search alternatives that are free and not enshitified, like google used to be in the early 2010s.
It's so disgusting, I hate this industry.
We just don't need to search as much. But I _do_ still want to search sometimes, it's still a valid use case, just not as important as it used to be.
But when a do search, I want simple, relevant, external search results so that I can go straight to those good sources. Google isn't satisfied with their returns on that though.
There's no alternative left, no webrings, no web directories. If all your content is now only on your server, you're invisible.
In some ways the last bastion of the real web are the web comics. Small personal projects where they link to like minded other projects.
I never had much luck with it - this mostly covers my experience: https://www.tumblr.com/ddgvsggl
I wouldn't be surprised if they made up the statistics to justify the enslopification.
edit: my school blocks all search engines other than google though XD
If I'm looking for a relatively straightforward and simple piece of information quickly (e.g. "wooden arch mirror stores linden") then the AI summary can be useful, because I don't need more than surface level info.
If I intend to analyze and understand something (e.g. "developer API issues Zoho Thrive"), then the AI summary and the general degradation in the quality of search results from Google really hinder me. I have to work to avoid a lazy and low value answer, whereas what I really want to do is go through various actual websites and reflect on them to gain insight.
It's better to just ask codex to do the search for me, but this is much slower - but increasingly my go to. I wish there was a fast search api codex could hook into to answer internet questions faster.
If I have an issue with my Mac, seeing an Apple Discussions result at the top readies me for disappointment.
Meanwhile, I've found a normal chat with current ChatGPT to be very helpful, as long as it isn't about itself or other OpenAI products.
When people open a search bar and type stuff, they're showing an incredibly strong intent to... search the web.
This reminds me of when MS tried to turn all Windows user interactions into bing, or (even worse) copilot. How did that work out for them?
Anyway, unlike windows, there's zero cost to switch away from Google's search product. I'm predicting a bigger backfire.
DDG has <1% market share, so +28%, while encouraging, means nothing for the monopoly. I use it. I use Brave Search as well. Paid for Kagi for a while.
But getting people to use anything other than Google (or the default Bing for on Windows) is nearly impossible at scale.