The Escape That Wasn't

A few days after I wrote about Google replacing Search with Gemini wearing Search's clothes, the numbers started coming in. DuckDuckGo's U.S. app installs spiked 30% in the week following Google I/O, sustained across six consecutive days, holding through Memorial Day weekend when DDG normally sees traffic drop. On iOS it peaked at 69.9% in a single day. The press framed it as users rejecting AI search. I'm not sure that's what actually happened. Go look up the app those people installed. It's called DuckDuckGo, Duck.ai, & VPN. That's the name. AI is in the title. Open it up and the homepage has two buttons sitting side by side in the search bar: Search, and Ask AI. The AI-assisted answers feature — their equivalent of Google's AI Overviews — is on by default in "sometimes" mode. The actual AI-free experience lives at noai.duckduckgo.com, a subdomain you have to already know exists to find. The TechCrunch article notes that visits to that page averaged 22.7% week-over-week growth…