1264
DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search
(techcrunch.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
No, they're not, but they are one of the better-known alternatives to Google, and they do advocate privacy. This, in itself, is a good thing and should be promoted.
The problem is that Google's monopoly on web search is so large that using Google is the de facto standard for the vast majority of people. Getting them to acknowledge that there are alternatives to Google benefits privacy on the internet more than DDG having contracts with MS harms it.
Switching from Google to MS/Bing isnt really much of a privacy win.
DuckDuckGo literally uses Bing for search results.
Why should I literally care?
What's the alternative? The basically unusable Mojeek? Rawdogging Bing? SearXNG?
Qwant and Ecosia teamed up to make a European indexer/web crawler. They're still using Bing to pad the result quality for now but slowly phasing out reliance on Bing from what I understand.
Still, they also push AI so can use this argument:
https://www.qwant.com/?llm=0
Ecosia have to use cookies unfortunately to disable AI overview:
https://www.ecosia.org/settings