As AI is increasingly injected into every facet of our lives whether we like it or not, it seems we can only watch in a mixture of horror and frustration as so many of our once-reliable institutions become unusable husks of their former selves. Take, for instance, Google. The search engine’s PageRank algorithm was such a massive hit when it launched that it wasn’t long before contemporary competitors like WebCrawler, Lycos, and AskJeeves were swept into the dustbin of history and Google experienced brand verbification, its name now synonymous with online queries.
Cut to the sorry state of affairs a quarter century later. Google Search is still the top website in the world in terms of page visits, but the bloom is clearly off the rose, and AI seems to be the source of customer dissatisfaction. After Alphabet began injecting artificial intelligence summaries at the top of its search results, users started noticing some weird answers that ranged from innocuously funny to downright dangerous. Google AI claimed that not a single country in Africa begins with the letter K. It also suggested one could improve a pizza recipe by adding glue to the cheese, and cited the health benefits of eating rocks. While many of these hallucinations have been reined in by Google devs, the AI just keeps coming. Last month, Google announced that even more AI was coming Google Search:
Users have started leaving the search giant in droves.
The exodus from Google Search can also be attributed to frustration with an apparent dip in search result quality, but it comes at a time when the masses are turning on AI writ large. It turns out that the brave new world being forced, top down, from the Silicon Valley bubble has little appeal to the average person. The prospect of eliminated jobs, endless slop made from stolen art, and a planet-destroying data center in every town somehow just isn’t appealing to the masses. It’s no wonder that one of Google’s competitors, DuckDuckGo, is leaning heavily into anti-AI rhetoric, hoping to establish itself as an AI-less promised land for those who yearn to be free.
As reported in TechCrunch, DuckDuckGo’s newly launched browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox allow users to set the site’s AI-free experience at noai.duckduckgo.com as their default. On this page, users won’t be bothered by AI-assisted answers or prompts to chat and their image search results will contain fewer images generated by AI, according to the company. And unlike with Google, those who opt for DuckDuckGo’s AI-free experience won’t find it mysteriously keeps reverting back to the AI-filled option.
Since Google announced it were essentially pot-committed to AI-first search results at their developer conference in early May, DuckDuckGo has reportedly experienced an explosion in traffic, with week-over-week installs of their app up 18.1% between May 20 and 25 and visits to their AI-less search page up 22.7% in that same timeframe.
Though it is primarily positioned as a privacy-focused company and not outright against AI, by courting the AI weary, DuckDuckGo’s seems to be savvily reading the writing on the wall, making itself a welcome sanctuary to at least a few of those posting about it online.
“Genuinely one of the only ad[s] i actually liked and upvoted,” commented Reddit user Ass_Lover136 in a glowing r/antiai post of one of DuckDuckGo’s ads on the platform. At time of publication, the comment had received 454 upvotes of agreement.
While seeking refuge from AI and the entities coercing us to use them is all well and good, let’s not go overboard or forget that none of these companies, DuckDuckGo, Google, or whoever comes next, regards its users as anything beyond a vehicle to make money.
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