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.

> 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.

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.

> 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 :(

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.

> downloading DuckDuckGo.

What for? Just use the website via your favourite browser.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

For what it’s worth, you don’t need to even download DDG. I just set it as my homepage on my iOS safari.

Downloading a search engine website?

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

>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.

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

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.

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?

try this:

  https://chatgpt.com/?q=how%20to%20decompress%20a%20tarball
  https://claude.ai/new?q=how%20to%20create%20a%20tarball

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).

0.2% of google users try out duck duck go after google pushes more AI doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

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.

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.

Random snapshot of what it looked like: https://web.archive.org/web/20220101023001/https://duckduckg...

...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.

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.

thanks for your work. Marginalia is important for the survival of the human internet

https://marginalia-search.com/

0.3% is definitely not a ”rounding error”. For Google it would mean roughly $650M drop in revenue.

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.

I don't think you can even refer to google as search anymore when it spews bullshit rather than furnishing results

And its 28% on the noai.duckduckgo.com domain, not in total. So it's even smaller.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

> 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.

"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

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.

I don't see search and AI as fundamentally distinct things. Usually I just want an answer.

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.

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.

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.

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"

> 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.

What if their move is to make AI search horrible so that OpenAI has no moves left here because trust in the product collapses?

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.

> 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.

Bad results keep you on their site longer, increasing ad revenue.

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?

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.

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

> 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.

they ruined search a while ago and they want to stop the bleeding

This is my experience as well.

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.

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

Same. If I need to Google it, I add "!g" to the search terms.

https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

!g is the best of both worlds.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because they want something they know that resembles the old Google Search which DDG provides.

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.

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.

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.

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

  {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14

I wonder what other alternative search engines Google lost to besides DDG.

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...

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...

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.

AI is downgrading non-AI search results with AI slop pages that get ranked high.

They were doing that long before they offered "AI" search results.

Not sure what you use for search, but it could be better ;)

http://kagi2pv5bdcxxqla5itjzje2cgdccuwept5ub6patvmvn3qgmgjd6...

(from https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/accessing-via-tor...)

Which country did this so I can avoid the hell out of it?

Also sorry!

Also toggle-able with a very visible and accessible widget that remembers your choice.

Yeah, there's no really good option in the search engine space.

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.

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.

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.

they dont even recommend using a different search engine? shame on them.

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'.