This is just marketing.
You get an "Auto-Generated" "Search Assist" summary at the top of most searches. So... they're using AI, you can just hide the summary. So, the "Ai is not the default" claim is bullshit, and I'm now less trusting of duckduckgo if they're willing to pretend their 'no AI' angle is substantial. 30% increase on the noai.duckduckgo.com subdomain. I wonder what % that is of their total traffic? Can I guess <5%?
Techcrunch mentions this in the last paragraph.
Nice marketing I guess? If techcrunch would lead with pointing out this is just marketing and they're totally an AI company, this article would count as journalism.
Honest question: Are people this stupid? Are techcrunch reporters this credulous and uncritical? I am genuinely completely on board with replacing this kind of 'journalism' with AI summaries of PR releases rather than gild them with fading gleam of actual journalism.
I've been building information extraction and discourse analysis tools for exactly this reason: most 'journalism' is lower effort than a the AI summaries they're complaining about.
Everything is marketing now
What is the AI going to summarize once journalism is dead?
So I kinda feel I have to ask: did you read the article, or did you read an AI summary?
You're doing these in the wrong order.
Where was this claim made? Nowhere in the article says that.
Salesman have for a long time teaching new salesman to use NLP tricks like matching and mirroring to convince people you're relatable and trustworthy. Google is doing this with all the data they have on you.
Where can I find such accommodating customers myself?
There's a difference between "linking to a source that may be incorrect" and "you providing the text that's blatantly wrong", and Google seems too big to care about it.
People call it hallucinating. I think it is lying. Google etc.. became a huge liar. All those AI slop companies are lying to the people now.
I find that those "AI summaries" google tends to use by default, are hallucinating liars. I stopped wasting my time with this AI slop spam in general. Any "human" still using AI and targeting me, gets perma-banned without any further discussion. I kind of need ublock origin for EVERYTHING. (Ublock origin is great, but I need this on every level, blocking AI slop spam, blocking Nate's donation-daemon nag-widget for KDE and so forth - ok, the last one is easy to disable, just patching out the part where Nate thinks it is ok to harass people, but for AI slop spam from external sites I need something more effective than ublock origin, kind of like an ublock colossal shield.)
I think it's reasonable to assume that Google artificially nerfed its search engine before they pushed so massively for AI.
I don't think either of these sentences is true.
> Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?
I didn't say anything about a moral line, I just said that there are a lot of programmers who are very excited to remove themselves from being employable. I didn't even say whether I thought that was good or bad!
Basically, signalling that they are going to be cooperative subjects for the enemy's occupation of the land.
"I, for one, welcome our new giant insect overlords" is, IMHO, the operative meme here.
Others are just addicted, the cycle of fast interaction and reward in coding agents is not very different from gambling or crack cocaine.
Many developers even seem to predict an increase in demand in the medium to long term as AI written systems increasingly begin to need human attention.
I think the hyper enthusiastic ones are more vocal, but there's a quieter and larger group who are somewhat more measured about it.
What the fuck do you expect? That people just cheer a brave new world of diminishing salaries and disappearing jobs along with some vague promises that every thing will be alright?
How many people here got rich by automating away the jobs of others? I mean, what is this? Others are fair game, but programming is sacred? That's quite simply the peak of absurdity.
Unionize.
thats a lot of c-suites
(or the anti-ai crowd is more vocal than the occasional chatgpt user)
but its also obviously not true that "AI is only popular with AI providers and delusional C-suites.
i hate unsolicited ai in my software as much as the next guy. but it’s silly to claim ai isn’t popular just because you don’t like it.
Furthermore, where did that number come from? What does "active" mean? What does "user" mean?
https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
weekly and monthly active users are common industry terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_users
my comment is not in support of google's ai search. or ai in general.
just pushing back on "ai is not popular", because it is obviously popular by any reasonable metric.
I don't think anyone who works in product management at any company in 2026 understands this, so you're not alone.
by any reasonable metric, ai is popular. that doesn't change just because you super-duper hate it.
your insistence that i dont understand something unrelated to the point of my comment is weird.
My suspicion - for which I have no proof - is this: With search results, Google marks the ads. The marking has gotten ever more subtle over the years, but it's there. If you want to avoid clicking on ads, you can. With AI, Google wants to integrate ads seamlessly into the results. If you search for widgets, and Acme Corp. has paid Google enough, the AI summary will praise the virtues of Acme's widgets. And the user will have no idea that this is paid placement, instead of a summary of product reviews, etc..
The AI popup is the worst and will hallucinate answers from Reddit comments. I specifically had it ask me a nonsense question which was literally just someone's Reddit comment suggesting a follow-on topic B to the search topic A. The AI mode will _sometimes_ be useful enough to prompt into doing the search and summarization for me and get me just enough info and some links to continue the work myself.
Better privacy, good results, no drama, first search engine to include bangs, and its free!
DuckDuckGo results are even more frustrating than the currently-terrible version of Google for finding good information IMO.
For some context sensitive searches where words overlap with more common topics I have a Kagi subscription.
The funniest one for me in google is +"foo" they decided people didn't actually mean it, so they changed it to +""foo"" - then when we all started doing that, they made the new secret "yes I really want that string" to be +"""foo"""
DDG today has two search options, IMO, both could get some improvement.
Of course there are no absolute numbers or scale. This is just an advertisement for DuckDuckGo. It's gross that previously respected tech publications run this kind of slop for clicks
I did have one site which told me I needed to use Chrome, Edge, or Firefox to use their site. Which kind of made me laugh considering the engine Brave uses. It was a really interactive JS heavy training site, so I guess they really wanted to be sure the browser was compatible to avoid support issues.
If you're just trying new browsers to see what's out there and clean, I've really liked Orion.
That being said, I've used "Ask Leo" a handful of time, with mixed results. It's really good for "Give me the TLDR" or "Find the part of the page that talks about X".
Think of premium branding analogy: masses get cheap AI slop, wealthy get high quality human-curated and human-created produce. Like organic vs regular food.
So for example all the productivity/digital detox channels and videos are themselves a consumer demand to be watched on YouTube, on phones. And now we have anti-AI products marking themselves higher for a feature that didn't previously exist. It's like the tree of capital gets split at every turn.
But this is also just my anecdotal experience and I haven't been on DDG for long yet since Kagi, so my perspective may not be proper yet.
DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
Unfortunately, whenever I used DuckDuckGo, the search results were also crap - and the User Interface was crap too. For some reason these web-searches suck, from A to Z, starting at the UI, but more importantly showing search "results" that are really qualitatively not good or inclusive. We already HAD good results - Google search used to be usable, then Google killed it off deliberately. Some inspiration Google appears to have taken from youtube, where you can search for "xyz", and it shows you "abc" instead after a while, which is horrible but not totally horrible as you may just watch another video. But for exact text search, copying that was stupid. Google ruined its search engine deliberately over several years, hoping that people will never notice it. And now we should use this crap AI garbage "search"? That is a privatized web. I refuse to help transition to private actors controlling the www. For similar reasons I do not use AMP and recommend everyone to not fall for the trap Google puts at you.
Either way, someone can hopefully tell the DuckDuckGo team to offer alternatives that do not suck in their search engine. (Qwant also sucks, by the way - they just copy/pasted Google's search UI; perhaps some people want it, I don't. I want oldschool search. Simple. Stay simple. Don't clutter the UI. Don't add garbage. Don't lie to the user. And so forth.)