00:00:00
Speaker 1: Ginagon dot Com, Colorado's Morning News. The search engine Duck duck Go is seeing a major boost in traffic as users are turning away from Google after the world's biggest search engine announced changes to its core search product. Joining us on the KWA Common Spirit Health Hotline with the latest ABC News Tech reporter Mike Tbuski, Mike, appreciate your time. As always, I'll be honest. I mean, I don't think I've ever used duck duck Go.
00:00:25
Speaker 2: I remember.
00:00:26
Speaker 1: I think they had a ton of Super Bowl ads hit, a lot of promotion of people trying to use it, But it seems like they're starting to embrace a no AI search experience.
00:00:35
Speaker 2: Explain this a little bit, Yeah, absolutely, So. This all started a few weeks ago after Google Io and Google obviously the dominant search engine out there. Google is synonymous with searching for something on the Internet, and they announced these big changes coming to Google Search again, they're kind of core product. Among those changes was what's called an intelligent search box, where instead of kicking you over to a bunch of different links to websites that might be the answer to your question, Google is instead going to set up a chatbot experience for some searches and you can kind of go back and forth with Gemini their artificial intelligence technology to see if it can get you to an answer to your question. And Google is kind of really pushing this because they want people to use Gemini, They want people to use their artificial intelligence products, in large part because they are spending so much in developing these products. However, it seems like that might have backfired at least to a degree for Google. In fact, Duck Duck Go, which is one of their competitors, much smaller company based in Pennsylvania, been around since two thousand and eight. They say they saw twenty one percent more installations of their browser in the week after Google made these announcements, including a thirty seven percent spike on the day that they actually made this intelligence search box announcement. And in fact, their version of duc duc go that does not incld AI. The mainline duc doc go has sort of AI integrations like you would expect to see on you know, Google Search or other platforms out there, but they also offer basically a version that turns it all off, where you just get your links, you just have that traditional search experience. It's called no AI dot DUC dot go, They again, you know, don't include any AI assisted answers. That page saw a twenty three percent increase in searches during the week after Google made these announcements.
00:02:27
Speaker 1: Do you think this is going to be short lived for duc doc go, Like, do you think we're going to see this boom, this excitement of finding something in an opportunity of not having AI or is it a good competitor when it comes to Google? Are you still getting the same information just not that AI chatbot that people don't really want their searches?
00:02:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean it's you know, worth kind of just level setting here that Google still dominates this market. They control something like ninety percent of the online search engine market. In duc duco remains well a prominent you know, alternative to Google Search, not like a real competitor to them in that way. But I do think that there is this kind of growing appetite underlined by this new data for people to avoid artificial intelligence. You know, there is this kind of anti AI sentiment that has been growing, not just in data like this, but also when you know, we see backlash to other companies integrating AI into their services or college students booing commencement speakers who mention AI right. There is this sort of like lingering undercurrent of I'm not really happy with this technology. We have to remember that even the most advanced models from the most advanced companies Open Ai and Google, they still screw up, right, they still make mistakes. They're still untrustworthy to the degree that people don't you know, trust them with you know, important searches like this, And as Google tries to put more and more of that in front of the traditional search experience, I think you're going to continue to see data points like.
00:03:57
Speaker 1: This ABC News Tech reporter. It's Mike Debuski.
00:04:00
Speaker 2: Thanks Mike, of course, Figure
Speaker 1: Ginagon dot Com, Colorado's Morning News. The search engine Duck duck Go is seeing a major boost in traffic as users are turning away from Google after the world's biggest search engine announced changes to its core search product. Joining us on the KWA Common Spirit Health Hotline with the latest ABC News Tech reporter Mike Tbuski, Mike, appreciate your time. As always, I'll be honest. I mean, I don't think I've ever used duck duck Go.
00:00:25
Speaker 2: I remember.
00:00:26
Speaker 1: I think they had a ton of Super Bowl ads hit, a lot of promotion of people trying to use it, But it seems like they're starting to embrace a no AI search experience.
00:00:35
Speaker 2: Explain this a little bit, Yeah, absolutely, So. This all started a few weeks ago after Google Io and Google obviously the dominant search engine out there. Google is synonymous with searching for something on the Internet, and they announced these big changes coming to Google Search again, they're kind of core product. Among those changes was what's called an intelligent search box, where instead of kicking you over to a bunch of different links to websites that might be the answer to your question, Google is instead going to set up a chatbot experience for some searches and you can kind of go back and forth with Gemini their artificial intelligence technology to see if it can get you to an answer to your question. And Google is kind of really pushing this because they want people to use Gemini, They want people to use their artificial intelligence products, in large part because they are spending so much in developing these products. However, it seems like that might have backfired at least to a degree for Google. In fact, Duck Duck Go, which is one of their competitors, much smaller company based in Pennsylvania, been around since two thousand and eight. They say they saw twenty one percent more installations of their browser in the week after Google made these announcements, including a thirty seven percent spike on the day that they actually made this intelligence search box announcement. And in fact, their version of duc duc go that does not incld AI. The mainline duc doc go has sort of AI integrations like you would expect to see on you know, Google Search or other platforms out there, but they also offer basically a version that turns it all off, where you just get your links, you just have that traditional search experience. It's called no AI dot DUC dot go, They again, you know, don't include any AI assisted answers. That page saw a twenty three percent increase in searches during the week after Google made these announcements.
00:02:27
Speaker 1: Do you think this is going to be short lived for duc doc go, Like, do you think we're going to see this boom, this excitement of finding something in an opportunity of not having AI or is it a good competitor when it comes to Google? Are you still getting the same information just not that AI chatbot that people don't really want their searches?
00:02:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean it's you know, worth kind of just level setting here that Google still dominates this market. They control something like ninety percent of the online search engine market. In duc duco remains well a prominent you know, alternative to Google Search, not like a real competitor to them in that way. But I do think that there is this kind of growing appetite underlined by this new data for people to avoid artificial intelligence. You know, there is this kind of anti AI sentiment that has been growing, not just in data like this, but also when you know, we see backlash to other companies integrating AI into their services or college students booing commencement speakers who mention AI right. There is this sort of like lingering undercurrent of I'm not really happy with this technology. We have to remember that even the most advanced models from the most advanced companies Open Ai and Google, they still screw up, right, they still make mistakes. They're still untrustworthy to the degree that people don't you know, trust them with you know, important searches like this, And as Google tries to put more and more of that in front of the traditional search experience, I think you're going to continue to see data points like.
00:03:57
Speaker 1: This ABC News Tech reporter. It's Mike Debuski.
00:04:00
Speaker 2: Thanks Mike, of course, Figure
