Encouraged by a colleague, I’ve switched to using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine instead of Google.
It’s not even about privacy for me, and only a little about avoiding the ads. Instead, it’s all about getting rid of the nonsense AI response at the top of the results.
There’s been this example floating around the web for months:
Will it be 2027 next year?
It is 2026 right now, and will be 2028 next year, followed by 2027.
Source: Google
After several months of people posting screenshots and poking fun at it, Google’s AI is just getting more convinced, using those posts as a reference. Someone said so on the internet, so it must be true!
This is the most blatant example, but for most other things, the primary source seems to be either a random bloke on Reddit saying something or some page that, when you click through to it, says nothing about the topic at all.
So, no thank you. I’m quite happy getting real search results instead.