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/
A website to help you start your own journey: https://purchasewithpurpose.io/
Keep it up and spread the word. No better time to make an impact.
68k users to 70k, wow! A whole 2k users? Google is fucked!
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.
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.
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’
Yeah, that shady Y-axis is doing some heavy lifting here.
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.)
Setting it as default search
i just installed this reply to your comment!
whats a kagi
google it
Hahaha, enjoy my upvote
Your username is fantastic
It’s a paid search engine and it’s quite excellent.
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
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 no guarantee that they will not turn shitty later. There never is and never will be, with any service you dont host yourself.
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
I think you missed a “no” before “guarantee”
yes. thanks.
windows 11 is paid. So is netflix
windows itself is not the main source of income for microsoft.
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.
I also didn’t come away impressed enough my from Kagi demo to begin paying for it. If they weren’t leaning so hard into AI stuff I may have paid for a bit just to support the idea of a search engine that “you weren’t the product” as the saying goes.
You might want to check who owns it and which country’s war it is currently benefiting.
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
Russia, is that close enough
All I can find is that some 2% of their budget goes to Yandex licensing. Which is definitely a shame, but not worth a full on boycott for me. If it was a higher number, sure.
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.
Yandex is nice to use when I want to do a search that doesn’t give a fuck about DMCA shit.
Search engine :)
Paid search engine with no tracking, no ads, great features. Am a very happy user of it.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/meaning.html
It means “key” in Japanese.
It’s a health exercise?
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…
Qwant is great
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.
What about SearXNG?
Also, for browsers, Zen, my beloved.
Do you guys find DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, or Qwant to be better?
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.
ecosia and qwant are at least not american, but all three really enjoy AI which I don’t like. I personally use ecosia.
DuckDuck and Qwant for me
I seem to not be able to disable AI stuff on Ecosia anymore
They all primarily use Bing, so the results are pretty similar.
If French or German happens to be your first language, Ecosia & Qwant have been collaborating on an EU-centric search index to deliver better localized results, starting with those two markets.
Otherwise, it’s kindof a wash.
Why the past few days?
Cuz fucgol went all AI now.
I install my search. My operating system is internet explorer.
I honestly tried duckduckgo and it is awful. Doesn’t give me correct result, any alternatives other than Kagi?
Qwant and Ecosia would be the next two on the list.
Brave also, but people (rightly) have issues with their owner. He is a huge advocate against gay rights.
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.
