So TechCrunch reported this week that DuckDuckGo installs are up 30 percent, and the framing they used was that people are "rejecting being force-fed" Google's AI search. That phrase stuck with me, because it's exactly the sensation I've had for months and never had good words for. Force-fed. Yeah, that's it exactly.
I'd like to tell you I made some principled decision to switch search engines. I didn't. What actually happened is dumber and way more specific than that.
Two weeks ago I was trying to figure out why my ancient Breville espresso machine kept throwing a blinking descale light two days after I'd already descaled it. Typed the model number and "descale light won't turn off" into Google, hit enter, and got a paragraph. An AI-generated paragraph, confidently telling me to hold down two buttons for five seconds, which is not a real thing on this machine, and I know that because I checked the manual afterward out of sheer disbelief. Below that paragraph sat the actual forum threads and the actual Breville support page, the things that would've had my real answer, buried under a block of text some model invented because it sounded plausible.
That's the part that gets me. Not that AI Overviews exist, and not even that they're sometimes wrong. It's that they go first, and they're confident, and they push everything that might have been correct further down the page where I have to actively scroll past the thing Google decided I should read instead.
So I switched my default to DuckDuckGo on my phone that same afternoon, mostly out of irritation, and then just never switched it back. My laptop took another week because old habits are sticky and the address bar keeps autocompleting to whatever it already knows. Now it's DuckDuckGo everywhere, and results look like results again: links, snippets, a page I can scan in four seconds instead of a paragraph I have to read all the way through just to figure out whether it's even relevant to what I asked.
I don't think this makes me part of some huge movement, and I'm a little annoyed that the 30 percent figure (installs, not usage, worth keeping those separate before anyone declares Google's search business is in trouble) is going to get repeated everywhere this week without anyone checking how small the base is that it's measured against. DuckDuckGo has been the scrappy alternative for, what, fifteen years now? I was writing about them on this blog back when their entire pitch fit on one line: we don't track you. That was basically the whole feature list. A 30 percent jump off whatever their baseline is could be a rounding error in Google's world and still be a genuinely big deal for theirs.
But the reason I switched isn't really about tracking anymore, is it. It's about wanting the thing I asked for, not the thing an AI decided I probably meant. Side note: this is also why I've mostly stopped using Spotify's new narrated-magazine-articles thing they rolled out this same week. Not because it's a bad idea, it's genuinely nice background noise while I'm doing dishes, but I keep catching myself wanting the version where I pick the words with my own eyes instead of having them read to me at someone else's pace. Small, probably says more about my mood lately than about the feature itself.
If you're still on Google by default and you've had one of these moments, the switch takes about ten seconds in your browser settings. The bang shortcuts turned out to be more useful day to day than I expected, honestly, !w straight to Wikipedia, !yt straight to YouTube, no extra click required. I'm not going back anytime soon.