DuckDuckGo’s popularity surged after Google expanded its AI features.
DuckDuckGo’s popularity surged after Google expanded its AI features.
5-29-2026
Information/Follow-up…
Google’s massive expansion into integrating artificial intelligence into its search engine is pushing an increasing number of users towards simpler, privacy-focused alternatives, most notably DuckDuckGo.
During the conference, Google unveiled a complete redesign of the search experience, based on an AI agent capable of answering questions, performing tasks, and running tools that operate in the background, instead of displaying the traditional list of known links.
But this move has sparked widespread criticism from users and experts, who believe the company is forcibly imposing AI technologies without providing a clear option to disable them completely, along with concerns about the accuracy of the answers and their impact on the future of the open web.
In contrast, DuckDuckGo reported a significant increase in the number of downloads of its application within the United States, with installations rising by an average of 18.1% between May 20 and 25 compared to the previous week, while the increase peaked at 30.5% on May 25.
On Apple phones, the app saw even greater growth, with downloads on iPhones increasing by an average of 33% weekly, peaking at around 69.9%.
Gabriel Weinberg said that Google “is forcing artificial intelligence on users with no real possibility of opting out,” adding that search results have become “worse, not better.”
He emphasized that his company seeks to give users the freedom to choose how much artificial intelligence is used, explaining that visits to the search page completely free of artificial intelligence technologies increased by 22.7% weekly.
The company also provides a proprietary AI platform called Duck.ai, which allows access to multiple models from companies such as Anthropic, Meta, Mistral AI and OpenAI, with an emphasis on privacy protection and not using conversations to train the models.
For his part, Camille Bazbaz explained that users do not reject artificial intelligence entirely, but simply want the freedom to choose how to use it.
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