this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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Google is losing users: DuckDuckGo installs are up 30%, and Kagi is seeing 3X growth (lemmy.world)
submitted 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) by FallenWalnut@lemmy.world to c/PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world
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These numbers exclude Ecosia, Brave, Qwant and all the other search engines that have seen a surge in sign-ups over the last few days.

You are also seeing people take the opportunity to switch browsers. Vivaldi specifically has reported substantial growth recently.

Article talking about DuckDuckGo: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/26/duckduckgo-installs-are-up-30-as-users-reject-being-force-fed-googles-ai-search/

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[–] razen@lemmy.world 8 points 8 hours ago

The growth is like an ant for the sheer amount of Google users. I mean almost every phone on earth is using Google by default.

[–] favoredponcho@lemmy.zip 42 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

68k users to 70k, wow! A whole 2k users? Google is fucked!

[–] FallenWalnut@lemmy.world 14 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

There is no central database, so we have to infer from what is available.

Kagi is the only paid service and so will have a fraction of the free options. The fact that their growth rate increased by 3X with 2k new users in a week is impressive.

DDG has 100m users and saw a 30% increase in their growth. Then you also have:

  • Ecosia (20m+)
  • Brave (50m+)
  • StartPage
  • Mojeek
  • Qwant
  • Etc.

It starts adding up...

Google is not going to lose its monopoly overnight. It is also particularly damaging when they burn through billions and lose market share.

[–] BennyTheExplorer@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Not really, because our modern financial system is mostly made up bullshit, that is detached from reality. Do you think investors care, that no one likes Google looses billions of dollars a year chasing AI? No, because it's just a speculative investment vehicle. The stock market is just gambling for rich people and the belief that it helps anyone or reflects reality in any meaningful way is a fundamental pillar of the propaganda that keeps our financial system afloat.

It's still nice, that more people are escaping big tech though.

[–] tempest@lemmy.ca 12 points 11 hours ago

I don't use Google but the second I read this headline and thought critically for a second or was more ' wow DDG doesn't have many users does it'

[–] grue@lemmy.world 14 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Who the fuck "installs" DuckDuckGo? It's a website!

spoiler

(To everybody about to tell me they have a browser app thing too: that's just stupid, IDGAF, shut up. DuckDuckGo is a place you use your real browser, i.e. Firefox, to navigate to.)

[–] mattyroses@lemmy.today 3 points 8 hours ago

Setting it as default search

[–] HeyJoe@lemmy.world 9 points 11 hours ago

I still use Firefox, but i made the switch to duckduckgo a few years ago and stopped using google. I also work on people's PC's and have always setup my defaults on them so they also now use duckduckgo instead of google. It may be small, but at least i feel like i am doing my part. I am also working on having our company set its default to ddg as well which would change about 4k over. They are to big and gotta go...

[–] Grass@sh.itjust.works 3 points 7 hours ago

I install my search. My operating system is internet explorer.

[–] godsammitdam@lemmy.zip 6 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

What about SearXNG?

Also, for browsers, Zen, my beloved.

[–] Freakazoid@lemmy.ml 5 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

Do you guys find DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, or Qwant to be better?

[–] SethTaylor@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago

DuckDuck and Qwant for me

I seem to not be able to disable AI stuff on Ecosia anymore

[–] Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 11 hours ago

I find them to be not Google. Which has become so bad anyway that even if they are slightly worse, I don't really notice. For example I often resort to Google when I get frustrated with ddg's results and it rarely fares better.

[–] baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 11 hours ago

ecosia and qwant are at least not american, but all three really enjoy AI which I don't like. I personally use ecosia.

[–] SHBI7368@sh.itjust.works 11 points 14 hours ago (6 children)

whats a kagi

[–] dadGPT@lemmy.world 29 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

google it

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 13 points 12 hours ago

Hahaha, enjoy my upvote

[–] frank@sopuli.xyz 4 points 11 hours ago

Your username is fantastic

[–] TragicNotCute@lemmy.world 13 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

It’s a paid search engine and it’s quite excellent.

[–] Jhex@lemmy.world 5 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

I have heard it is super good; however, when I tried it I felt it was about the same as Qwant or Starpage. Having said that, I acknowledge I did not really performed a good test, just browsed around a bit.

I do have a question, with all the corporate ghouls sucking up all our private data to resell later; how do we know Kagi is not just hoarding to enshitify? I honestly think if I paid another service just to wind up with them selling my data anyway I am going to have a rage stroke

[–] bort@sopuli.xyz 8 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

how do we know Kagi is not just hoarding to enshitify?

"if you are not the customer, you are the product". Or to phrase it differently: they have a strong incentive not to enshittify, as that would lose them lots of paying customers.

That being said, there is guarantee that they will not turn shitty later. There never is and never will be, with any service you dont host yourself.

[–] Jhex@lemmy.world 8 points 12 hours ago

they have a strong incentive not to enshittify, as that would lose them lots of paying customers.

Sorry bud but that's just naive; literally all the big corpos we hate now were beloved when they started. Kagi already dropped their first paid tier from 500 to 300 searches per month. I am not saying that they will necessarily enshittify but I would certainly not assume they won't just because they are selling something (look at Plex for a very recent case)

That being said, there is guarantee that they will not turn shitty later. There never is and never will be, with any service you dont host yourself.

I think you missed a "no" before "guarantee" but I understand the point. There are not guarantees but this one doesn't even look like a good candidate to stay clean IMO (plus as a Canadian, I would not subscribe to an American company for the time being, I just saw their wiki to find out where they are based)

Thanks for your reply

[–] atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 9 hours ago

windows 11 is a paid. So is netflix

[–] TragicNotCute@lemmy.world 5 points 11 hours ago

I tried both when I was originally planning to switch off Google and Startpage was my favorite of the bunch, but there’s were key queries it would fumble hard and I’d miss something I needed that Google (and later Kagi) found.

[–] KiwiTB@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

You might want to check who owns it and which country's war it is currently benefiting.

[–] 000@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

I can't seem to find anything particularly damnning, can you give me a link or just a lede about this?

I pay for Kagi but would happily and eagerly stop if it's funding israel or something

[–] almost1337@lemmy.zip 6 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Kagi (pronounced kah-gee) was founded in 2018 by Vladimir Prelovac in Palo Alto, CA. Our advisory board includes Raghu Murthi, Dr. Norman Winarsky, Stephen Wolfram and Rory Sutherland.

I... fail to see the problem?

[–] Maxxie@piefed.blahaj.zone 6 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

They do use yandex services(russian state cloud provider) among others. That's not that damning -- its one of the few 'independent' (as in, not google or microsoft) search indexes.

That's the only connection I know of, other than CEO named Vladimir.

[–] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 hours ago

Yandex is nice to use when I want to do a search that doesn't give a fuck about DMCA shit.

[–] IDew@lemmy.zip 9 points 14 hours ago

Search engine :)

[–] Cybersec@piefed.social 4 points 13 hours ago

Paid search engine with no tracking, no ads, great features. Am a very happy user of it.

[–] TheGoldenV@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago

It’s a health exercise?

[–] Beacon@fedia.io 7 points 14 hours ago

Qwant is great

[–] tyler@programming.dev 5 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Why the past few days?

[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 11 points 14 hours ago

Cuz fucgol went all AI now.

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

A while back there was a user on Lemmy that would not stop pushing Kagi in every freaking comment they made and they were in so many threads to the point that they are the main reason I have never tried it.