I...What?!

At my guitar teacher's place, we're looking for the URL of a particular store selling vacuum tubes (my Peavey needs at least one new 12ax7 preamp tube), and he gets out his phone and searches and I see...DuckDuckGo?!

I've been using DDG on my laptop for a while, though keep forgetting to actually set it on my phone too. But while I'd expect to see it in a nerdy context, my teacher is a musician. Felt very strange to see it in the wild.

Extremely small sample size. But maybe people are getting tired of Google, and tracking, and all its AI features slammed at the top of the page? I was using Google with various Firefox plugins to remove that stuff, then realized that if I was doing that, maybe I should at least look at DDG (which has its own AI stuff, but at least has a no-AI mode).

gemlog