Can DuckDuckGo save me from AI slop? It's complicated...

Google's been going down hill recently. Results are worse, Gemini is shoved down our throats... Everything just feels slow, clunky and laden with ads. Knowing that every key stroke and mouse movement is being forensically analyzed for profit doesn't help either.

Would another search engine cure my woes? I've tried DuckDuckGo before, but it always felt Inferior? It would never keep up with my queries- especially with coding. I've also tried StartPage, and while the results were great- it never felt right? They both had me manually typing in google.com to find what I wanted.

It's been 4 years since my last DuckDuckGo switch. Last time? I switched for 2 weeks, where I kept hitting blocks that required me to open Google, subsequently throwing me back into the smothering arms of Google all over again. Would it be any different in 2026?

Duck Duck Go in 2026... Actually good???

I bit the bullet. My phone, laptop and desktop: all Duck Duck Go. The first thing at the top of my searches? AI hallucination slop. This is part of what I switched to escape! At least make it opt in! Worse yet, the setting to disable it wouldn't work. I had to install a browser extension... But after that? It worked.

The results loaded faster, the UI felt less overstimulating- searches just felt less cumbersome somehow! I found stuff faster: coding questions that broke DDG years ago were no problem anymore, with relevant StackOverflow posts topping my results. More tricky queries like health questions were passable, not as good as Google, but serviceable! The news search functionality was also fine.

Overall, my DuckDuckGo experience was sufficient enough that opening Google felt like too much friction. Perfect! I've found myself marveling over how much worse Google feels in comparison. Using DDG has felt like going back to the pre AI web in many respects.

The gotcha...

This is all great, but there is a catch: you can have the best search engine in the world, but if it can't filter out AI slop? You're gonna get slop in your results. DDG is (unfortunately) no exception to this. The fact is: the web is just worse now. Slop articles are generated faster than real people can write.

None of this is unique to DDG though, and developing a discerning eye to AI slop can help.

Google sobriety

I've been Google free for over 3 months now. I've only opened Google a hand full of times, and even when I do... Half the time the results are worse or no better anyway!

It feels so good to decenter a tech giant like Google from my internet experience. It feels even better knowing that the Alphabet panopticon can't track me as easily.

Is DuckDuckGo perfect? Definitely not. It is buying into the AI slop bubble, and it does use Bing for some (maybe even most) of its results. However, it does have its own crawler, which will no doubt play a bigger role in years to come.

Overall, I'd say this switch was well worth it. Whenever I open up Google, I automatically want to switch back to DuckDuckGo. For me? The grass is greener. I'm very curious how others haven't found the same, but I feel lucky my experience has allowed me to switch.