DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don’t want AI | usagoldmines.com

DuckDuckGo has become the most visible search alternative to Google…and right now, we could use one. Google’s Gemini “AI” system, chopping up 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 looks like I’m not alone: In a recent DuckDuckGo poll, 90 percent of responses chose “Search without AI.”

This is just a poll, and it would be fundamentally wrong to say that DuckDuckGo isn’t using any “AI” systems. In fact it has a whole-ass “AI” chatbot product, Duck.ai, which is bundled in with DuckDuckGo’s privacy VPN for $10 a month. DuckDuckGo distinguishes its self-branded setup as a way to have private conversations with powerful LLMs including ChatGPT, Claude, Sonnet, and Llama. If you’re trying to get “AI” out of every facet of your online presence, DDG seems like it’s waffling on the issue, in stark contrast to other niche tech products like Vivaldi.

DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg seems to be leaning into user choice on the topic. “At DuckDuckGo our approach to AI is to only make AI features that are useful, private, and optional,” [emphasis his], he writes on his personal site. DuckDuckGo also has two new flavors of URL for those who want to opt out or opt in to “AI” features, at noai.duckduckgo.com and yesai.duckduckgo.com, respectively. Here it should be pointed out that privacy-focused users who don’t want “AI” in their search are more likely to use DuckDuckGo, and those users are even more incentivized to vote in this sort of poll.

I’m not super thrilled that DuckDuckGo is making and promoting “AI” features, while watching Google and others create so many problems. But I do appreciate that the company lets me turn off the “AI” features, flag and hide slop results (with varying degrees of success), and do it all without needing to create an account.

Correction: The original version of this article said that “DuckDuckGo users” chose “search without AI.” As a representative told me, DDG held the poll on the open web with no tracking, and there was no way to distinguish between DuckDuckGo users and those who did not use the service but chose to answer the poll.