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DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search
(techcrunch.com)
this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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I don’t even care about an ai overview at the top. Give me a search engine that ranks down the sea of blogs that launched a year ago and have 5,000+ articles that are just ai generated bullshit designed to capture as many search queries as possible
Ecosia, ddg, google, brave, etc are all laden with this shit and it clogs up the searches. “How do I do x” and an endless stream of “achieving x is possible. Here’s a bulleted list of the next 12 paragraphs, then a bunch of summarized info from Reddit posts that only answers your question in the most basic obvious way and has no accounting for any kind of edge case or even just non traditional but acceptable use case. And even if you just wanted the basic answer its useless because the LLM fluffed the sentence long answer with 12 pages of meandering nonsense”
I don't even mind people summarizing into they've found elsewhere, but like you said it's the most basic information—it's the opposite of summarizing, it's whipping up this lexical froth of bullshit filler around a tiny kernel of a factoid.
Meandering nonsense exactly. Just plausible enough for you to keep reading, and probably impressive to someone who doesn't know the domain, but as soon as you try to logically put together what you've read it falls apart.
The frustrating part is that getting around it sucks. I’m told Kagi has better support for this but from what I’ve read it relies on users downranking the domains, which is a fools errand given the flood of these sites. I’ve also seen people that maintain blocklists for this that work with things like adguard and uBlock but then you still get pages of slop, but all the links just 404 now
My conspiracy is that this is allowed and not dealt with to push people to use LLMs directly, which are quickly becoming the most effective way to search for information online (with the caveat that you either need to have the knowledge to identify errors or be willing to double check the information given for flaws. Also taking like 4-7x the energy to process queries)
Search for an item get a "19 best options for item in MAY 2026", click, blurb & amazon links!
Just ignore anything written the last two years basically
I definitely de-emphasize it, but eventually the slop is going to sink down to the lower layers of the internet
Ai is fucking great at SEO. But maybe it's time for a new system
Yeah it's hijacked so many of our old (admittedly tenuous) trust systems.
The worst being that a piece of detailed "content" is evidence that a human being cared enough about something to put effort into making it.