#duckduckgo

#duckduckgo

DuckDuckGo has reported "a sustained surge" of installs in the US in the week that followed Google's I/O developer conference, where the bigger company announced more AI features for Search. The search engine company says its app installs in the US were up an average of 18.1 percent for six consecutive days, peaking at 30.5 percent on May 25. Most of the new users are on iOS, with installs on iPhones showing an average growth of 33 percent week-on-week and also peaking on May 25 at 69.9 percent.

AI in search is hard to avoid these days. Google's AI Overviews are everywhere (even in your inbox), and Microsoft has incorporated a Copilot chat option on Bing.com. Results are mixed, and hallucinations are still a problem. Large language models can help you dig deeper into a topic by asking follow-up questions, but on DuckDuckGo, it's clear that web users aren't interested.

Privacy-focused consumer tech company DuckDuckGo launched a subscription plan last year that bundled a VPN service, personal information removal, and identity theft restoration. The company said Thursday that the subscription now gives users access to the latest AI models through Duck.ai without paying extra. The Duck.ai chatbot is free to use, and users get access to models like Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Haiku, Meta's Llama 4 Scout, Mistral AI's Mistral Small 3 24B, and OpenAI's GPT-4o mini.

Producers are trying to figure out more ways to pad their budgets. They're taking more of an active interest in the space.

DuckDuckGo now allows users to hide AI-generated images in search results, offering a new feature to combat the overwhelming presence of fake content in digital searches.

Generative AI products like ChatGPT and Gemini can produce incredible lifelike photos and videos with incredible ease, including deepfakes and AI images that utilize various animation styles.

Microsoft Bing has the weirdest bug where it stopped showing organic results that start with 'ate'. This has been going on for a few days!