Who wants AI? Not DuckDuckGo users.
The privacy-focused search engine asked its users whether they wanted to use AI in search. It even created two versions of the tool: one with AI and one without. Of the 175,354 votes submitted, over 90% chose the No AI option.
That seems rather difinitive. (Credit: DuckDuckGo)
DuckDuckGo offers an AI-free search experience via noai.duckduckgo.com. Those who want to experiment with AI can use yesai.duckduckgo.com. “You can also customize the search settings at duckduckgo.com for something in between,” says DuckDuckGo Founder Gabriel Weinberg.
You can toggle AI-generated images on or off, as well as the Search Assist function, which delivers AI summaries of queries. There’s also the option to disable the Duck.ai tool, which will let you chat with various AI models, and a simple toggle on duckduckgo.com for traditional search and duck.ai.
AI in search is hard to avoid these days. Google’s AI Overviews are everywhere (even in your inbox), and Microsoft has incorporated a Copilot chat option on Bing.com. Results are mixed, and hallucinations are still a problem. Large language models can help you dig deeper into a topic by asking follow-up questions, but on DuckDuckGo, it’s clear that web users aren’t interested.
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There are ways to get around the Google AI summaries, including browser extensions, but you can’t turn them off completely. DuckDuckGo users may be a niche corner of the web, but it’s clear that most of them don’t want to deal with AI when searching for information.
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Jon Martindale is a tech journalist from the UK, with 20 years of experience covering all manner of PC components and associated gadgets. He’s written for a range of publications, including ExtremeTech, Digital Trends, Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, and Lifewire, among others. When not writing, he’s a big board gamer and reader, with a particular habit of speed-reading through long manga sagas.
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