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At its I/O conference last week, Google made it abundantly clear it’s looking to leave behind the Search pages of yore, featuring hyperlinks to online content — and replacing them with a reimagined and AI-powered “intelligent search box.”
Instead of links, Google is looking to push users down an AI chatbot rabbit hole. That’s despite the tech’s glaring shortcomings, which the company has yet to meaningfully address, with the company’s flagship AI Overview feature still suffering from a staggering number of hallucinations.
Even something as simple as googling the word “disregard” sent the feature into a spiral, forcing the company to jump in after a wave of mockery.
Given the scale of the ever-growing backlash to AI, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that reactions to the latest news ranged from frustration to anger.
And many netizens are seemingly ready to call it quits once and for all, with week over week US installs of search alternative DuckDuckGo soaring 30 percent.
“People aren’t just complaining about Google’s AI search overhaul, they’re leaving,” the company’s official X account tweeted on Tuesday. “Momentum is growing. It’s time to Fire Google.”
“Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out,” DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg told tech journalist Paul Thurrott. “As a result, their results are getting worse, not better.”
“We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want,” he added. “That’s why we’re seeing a spike in people coming to DuckDuckGo this week, it’s as simple as that.”
Underscoring it all, responses to Google’s latest announcement were predominantly negative.
“Nobody asked you to change the box we asked you to fix the results,” one Reddit user wrote.
“Change how people use the Internet, by making them switch to Duck Duck Go,” another user joked.
The development highlights a growing surge in AI backlash, ranging from rural American towns revolting against plans for AI data centers to students jeering at the mere mention of AI during commencement speeches.
That backlash has become particularly apparent in the software world, with Microsoft finding out the hard way that its all-in approach to AI has become immensely unpopular.
Technically speaking, DuckDuckGo does offer its own AI product, called Duck.AI, as TechCrunch points out. However, the company appears to have grown wise to the backlash, offering a specifically AI-free search page — which has also seen traffic surge as of late.
More on Google search: Google Is Making Huge Changes That Are Poised to Decimate What’s Left of Journalism