DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don’t want AI

DuckDuckGo has become the most visible search alternative to Google… and right now, we could use one. Google’s Gemini “AI” system, slicing and spitting out results with a high degree of error and uncertainty, is what pushed me to switch to the privacy-focused search engine last year. It seems I’m not alone: ​​in a recent DuckDuckGo survey, 90% of responses chose “Search without AI.”

This East just a survey, and it would be fundamentally wrong to say that DuckDuckGo doesn’t use any “AI” systems. In fact, it has a full-featured “AI” chatbot product, Duck.ai, which comes bundled with DuckDuckGo’s Privacy VPN for $10 per month. DuckDuckGo distinguishes its branded setup as a way to have private conversations with powerful LLMs, including ChatGPT, Claude, Sonnet, and Llama. If you’re trying to leverage “AI” in all facets of your online presence, DDG seems to be hesitant on the issue, unlike other niche tech products like Vivaldi.

DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg appears to rely on user choice on the subject. “At DuckDuckGo, our approach to AI is to only create AI features that are useful, private and optional“, [emphasis his]he writes on his personal website. DuckDuckGo also offers two new URL versions for those who wish to opt out or enable “AI” features, at noai.duckduckgo.com and yesai.duckduckgo.com, respectively. It’s worth pointing out here that privacy-conscious users who don’t want “AI” in their search are more likely to use DuckDuckGo, and these users have even more incentive to vote in this type of poll.

I’m not very happy that DuckDuckGo is creating and promoting “AI” features, while Google and others are creating so many problems. But I like that the company lets me turn off “AI” features, report and hide results (with varying degrees of success), and do it all without needing to create an account.

Correction: The original version of this article stated that “DuckDuckGo users” chose “non-AI search.” As one representative told me, DDG ran the survey on the open web, with no tracking, and there was no way to distinguish DuckDuckGo users from those who didn’t. use the service but chose to complete the survey.