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yegg

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Gabriel Weinberg

https://gabrielweinberg.com/ (newsletter) https://ye.gg/ (personal homepage)

- Founder, DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/)

- Co-author, Traction (2015, https://a.co/d/453gPyM)

- Co-author, Super Thinking (2019, https://a.co/d/6R73EsW)

- Author, The Great Race (2025, https://thegreatrace.us/)

* Personal email: yegg@duck.com

* Work email: yegg@duckudckgo.com

* Bluesky: @yegg13.bsky.social

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yegg13/

I also have an older account where I generated a random username. That's @epi0Bauqu

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I think what people mean by everyone varies a lot, which is why I wanted to draw attention to more specific numbers. For example, in the Datos data cited[1], on desktop 86% were using traditional search engines >10 visits/month vs. only 21% for AI chat tools. That is indeed a very significant percentage, but more than 4x less than search and (at least I) wouldn't say that ~1/5 is "everyone."

[1] https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-20-of-americans-use-...

That feature (Search Assist) can be turned off in the settings, and we have a noai.duckduckgo.com domain that automatically turns it off along with other AI features. That said, Search Assist just summarizes web content and does not generate its own answers, but the summary is AI generated.

We are significantly more than that at this point, including that we've been working on our own web index for the past two years (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd...). But on top of that we don't get local results, knowledge graph, answers, sports, anything AI related, and many more essential modules from Bing, all of which collectively makes up a large % of the results at this point, let alone the vastly different UXs.

Well, I'd love to know; as I've said in some other comments, we've changed and improved a lot in the last couple years and so feel free to send me feedback.

Back of the envelope for you: Google does about $200B in search revenue, about half in the U.S. (so $100B). We have about 3% markt share in the U.S., which would equate to about $3B in Google monetization. Now, we make way way less than Google per search, in large part due to our privacy policy, but 10x less is still on the order of 300M per year. So, you can see how we can easily take in more than 36M per year.

Also, NAD is a very serious review process as NAD refers any unsubstantiated claims directly to the FTC. Lots of evidence, vetted by a third-party.