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Last week, Google made its big announcement update to SearchI heard a woman on the phone say that she’s switching to DuckDuckGo because you can “stop using AI.”
“Google isn’t Google anymore,” he said. It seems that others were of the same opinion.
At I/O, Google’s annual conference for developers, the company said that its blue contact list is being replaced by an AI assistant that answers questions, performs tasks, and runs back-office operations.
The return has been sharp.
Some have argued that it will kill the open netwhile others shared the concerns that AI is highlighting wrong surface answers and remove control from users who may not want to use AI. It also overcomplicates simple things. Just try to Google the words “to ignore.”
In response to Google’s changes, many have turned against DuckDuckGo, a privacy-watching system that has not been able to break Google’s dominance, which is only around 2%. US search market.
On Google time check antitrust case in 2023, CEO of DuckDuckGo Gabriel Weinberg he testified that Google’s search agreements damaged its ability to position itself as a default on other browsers.
“Google is force-feeding AI with no way out,” Weinberg said Tuesday in a statement, referring to the overhaul of Google Search. “As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be a place that puts users in control and gives them the ability to choose the AI they want or want. “
Now it appears that DuckDuckGo is starting to benefit as consumers flee AI.
DuckDuckGo said that US app installs rose 18.1% week over week between May 20 to May 25 period, compared to May 13 to May 18. The company said that growth continued for six consecutive days and reached 30.5% on May 25. 69.9%.
The search engine also said to visit its free AI site, noai.duckduckgo.coma figure of 22.7% WoW growth, up from 27.7% on May 24. The site will turn off all AI features, such as AI-assisted answers and AI-generated images, by default.
The company said this was strong in the US, and that DuckDuckGo continued to gain users over the Memorial Day weekend, when it typically sees the most traffic.
DuckDuckGo offers its own AI tool called Duck.ai. It’s free and doesn’t require users to create an account, but it does get samplesincluding Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 4 Scout, Mistral’s Small 3 24B, and OpenAI’s GPT-5 mini. All chats are private because DuckDuckGo logs a user’s IP address before requesting access to sample providers, deletes chats within 30 days, and restricts chats from being used for educational purposes.
“We not only respect user choice, but also user privacy,” Weinberg said. “Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is private; we don’t collect history or chats and none of it is used to train the AI.”
DuckDuckGo also offers Search Assist, which is similar to Google’s AI view, and an AI Image Filter that filters AI-generated images from search results.
Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s head of communications and policy, said both aspects of AI are among the company’s most popular, though they differ in opinion.
“People just want a choice,” Bazbaz said.
TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment.
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