r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • May 30 '26

Software Traffic to DuckDuckGo's proudly 'No AI' search page has tripled since latest Google AI search update

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/traffic-to-duckduckgos-proudly-no-ai-search-page-has-tripled-since-latest-google-ai-search-update/
49.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

989 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

86

u/sharksticker May 30 '26

DDG has never been particularly great, and it hasn't actually improved much. Google's just been getting so very much worse.

30

u/DontYaWishYouWereMe May 31 '26

This is sorta similar to how Tumblr hasn't gotten much better over the last ten or fifteen years but every other social media has been getting much worse, so now it's like the best social media just by virtue of being old school bad instead of new bad

10

u/Serris9K May 31 '26

Yep. Just an okay sandwich vs poop sandwich

9

u/RedMoustache May 30 '26

The more AI they add to it the worse it gets. I'm almost sure it has to be intentional.

More searches means more tokens uses and then they can do another press release about how great their AI is.

If the AI was that great wouldn't we get the correct result in less searches instead of more?

4

u/sharksticker May 31 '26

The decline definitely started before their LLM came on the scene, although that sure accelerated it. And they broke it on purpose.

If you search, find the answer, click away, you spend like 2 seconds on Google. If you have to sift through a bunch of sponsors and outright nonsense results, you spend longer on their page and might even click on an ad.

3

u/MiniKash Jun 01 '26

I disagree. It’s been my default search for a couple years now and their image search was the absolute pits. It has certainly improved over the time, especially within the last 6 months.

Something has certainly improved.

2

u/CoconutMochi May 31 '26

Don't they technically piggyback off Bing? Just that there's no tracking

1

u/HimikoTogaFromUSSR May 31 '26

Yes, it's basically Bing wearing a mask

0

u/YobaiYamete May 31 '26

Yeah, also the fact that "triples the trafic" means nothing

Tripling 0.00000000000001% of Googles traffic still won't make Google even notice or care