Google’s latest search overhaul has produced an unexpected winner. In the days after the company’s I/O event in May 2026, downloads of the DuckDuckGo app climbed sharply in the United States. The privacy-focused search engine reported an average 18.1 percent week-over-week increase in installs between May 20 and May 25. Growth held steady for six straight days. It reached 30.5 percent on Memorial Day. On iOS the numbers ran higher still. Weekly growth averaged 33 percent. One day it hit 69.9 percent. Third-party analytics firm Apptopia measured a 29 percent rise in average daily U.S. downloads and 12 percent globally over the same stretch. TechCrunch first detailed the data. But downloads tell only part of the story. Traffic to noai.duckduckgo.com, a dedicated page that turns off every AI feature by default, jumped too. Visits grew 22.7 percent week over week on average and peaked at 27.7 percent on May 24. Some reports put the increase even higher, with traffic tripling in the immediate aftermath.…