DuckDuckGo Goes Where No AI Can Go

It’s getting so you can’t avoid AI. If your 401k doesn’t have some AI-related stocks, forget about your investment returns. You can’t open a website without some AI chatbot trying to help you. If you use a Microsoft product, it really, really wants you to have CoPilot assist you. If you work, AI is either coming for your job, or your bosses are looking at how AI can assist you in that job. Google, long the king of search, thinks it has seen the future of search and that future is AI.

Credit: DuckDuckGo

Very exciting times, right? Golden opportunities ahead for sure. Well, not everyone is thrilled. The Wall Street Journal recently chronicled “The American Rebellion Against AI,” citing such examples about college commencement speakers getting booed when they mention AI, polls showing respondents’ concerns about AI, anger at the boom of data centers and the spillover effect on consumer utility bills, even Sam Altman’s house getting firebombed.

AI may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean people have to be happy about it, and it doesn’t mean that everyone is going along with it. DuckDuckGo is trying to help.

DuckDuckGo, in case you aren’t familiar, is a search engine that focuses on privacy. Its website brags: “We’re about data protection, not data collection,” and adding: “Search, browse, and use AI privately, keeping your information to yourself and away from hackers, scammers, and privacy-invasive companies.”  Its AI features are optional.

If you’ve never used DuckDuckGo, join the club. Let’s put it this way: reaching Bing’s levels of search is aspirational. But that may be changing, thanks to AI, or, rather, to AI backlash.

When Google made its May 19 I/O announcement about how it was further incorporating AI into its search, DuckDuckGo benefited.  The company claimed on Bluesky that visits to its “No AI” search page have tripled since Google’s announcement (“and still rising”).  TechCrunch reports “U.S. app installs were also up 18.1% week-over-week, with U.S. iOS app installs peaking at 69.9% week-over-week growth.”  Users can use the DuckDuckGo browser or download extensions for Chrome or Firefox.

“People aren’t just complaining about Google’s AI search overhaul, they’re leaving,” the company’s official X account tweeted. “Momentum is growing. It’s time to Fire Google.”

DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg told tech journalist Paul Thurrott:

Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out. As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want. That’s why we’re seeing a spike in people coming to DuckDuckGo this week, it’s as simple as that. Not only do we respect user choice, but also user privacy. Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is private, we don’t collect search histories or chats and nothing is used for AI training.

Mr. Thurrott notes: “Usage on iPhone and iPad was highest, with an average growth of 33 percent and peak growth of 69.9 percent on May 25.”

It’s not that DuckDuckGo is against AI per se. It offers Duck.ai, Search Assist, and an AI image filter. It just wants you to be in control. DuckDuckGo chief communications and policy officer Kamyl Bazbaz told Mr. Thurrott: “One of the most popular search features we’ve launched in years is a filter that removes AI images from image results. The other most popular feature? Search Assist, which uses AI to anonymously generate answers to search queries at the top of the search page. People just want a choice.” She noted that Google has such a monopoly that it can force AI on its users without fear of them leaving.

The flood of users to DuckDuckGo suggests that might not be true…yet.

The problem is that AI is coming at us too fast. It is evolving much faster than we can get used to it; we’re thinking up use cases for AI models that were valid several months ago, but now are woefully out of date. The future is coming at us too fast, and many of us don’t like it.

Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recently admitted to The New York Times:

A.I. is viewed as the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It’s progressing at an extraordinary pace, and humans aren’t evolved to process that much change. People, rightfully so, are anxious about the future that this technology will bring. I understand; it feels natural with such a profound technological shift. 

We tiptoed into the internet, then gradually embraced it, making lots of mistakes along the way (remember Pets.com?). We thought it would democratize information, failing to anticipate that a few tech giants would control most of the traffic or that our information was the thing that became the commodity.

We rushed into smartphones even faster, loving their ubiquity and power but, again, failing to recognize the impact that ubiquity would have on us, especially our kids.

So forgive us if many think the AI gold rush isn’t for our benefit.

Dylan Patel, CEO of AI-infrastructure consulting firm SemiAnalysis, recently said on a podcast: “People hate AI. AI is less popular than [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. AI is less popular than politicians.” Those are pretty low bars.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that only 21% think they can trust AI aways or almost always, and only a third are at all excited about AI. Eighty percent are concerned about AI, and the levels of concern do not vary as much by generation as one might expect.

Still, 51% of respondents have used AI to research topics, up from 37% a year ago. About a quarter have used it for school or work, to write something, to analyze data, or to create an image. Ready or not, we’re starting to use it, and companies like Google think we’re going to use it, like it or not.

Credit: WSJ

I like the DuckDuckGo attitude; it should be our choice. Most of us will eventually get round to using AI, but that time doesn’t have to be now. Can we just take some time to get used to it?

Then again, why is DuckDuckGo’s attitude towards privacy so unique, and why do so few of us value privacy enough to use it? I don’t like what those say about the tech industry, or about us.  

So kudos to DuckDuckGo for its AI (and privacy) stand, and I hope that the result of the AI backlash isn’t so much slower evolution as it is smarter adoption.