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DuckDuckGo Traffic
- Alir3z4 8y agoI've been using DuckDuckGo for more than a year now and barely use other search engines. It's the default on all the devices that I use. I am so happy to be a user and be part of their growth as well. The only thing that could improve it would be searches in other languages, I still don't get a good result when I search in other languages such as Russian, Persian, Arabic, etc.. Thank you DuckDuckGo for the great service <3
- jwilcoxson 8y agoI’ve also been all-in on DuckDuckGo for over a year now. I feel like it always gives me good results. I only speak English, but better support for other languages would be fantastic for those who can benefit from it.
- Alir3z4 8y agoI mainly search in English as well, but when trying to find local news, books or part of a song lyrics in different language it doesn't perform as other search engines would perform.
- wool_gather 8y agoSame, very happy using DDG. I hope they're becoming profitable. The one thing that I have to go back to Google for is when I want to search just one specific site (usually Stack Overflow, I guess). Google has the `site:example.com` feature. I don't think that's possible with DDG. EDIT: Apparently it does work! Thanks, I'm pretty sure it didn't when I started using DDG. Maybe I'm just an idiot.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago!so searches stack overflow, !im images, !g google, !w wikipedia etc. Take a look at bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang there's thousands of them.
- wool_gather 8y agoThat's a good point, thanks for reminding me about bangs. The one issue with them is that they're assigned by DDG (i.e., not free-form). (I don't think there was one for Stack when I started using DDG, and I never thought to check back.)
- froogie 8y agoFor me, bangs are the actual killer feature. Because when I set DDG as my default search engine in my browser, I get to use bangs at the address bar. So for example rather than having to use Wikipedia's or Stack Overflow's search bar to find something, it's just Ctrl+t and "!w <term>" or "!gi <term>". On Windows this is quite 50-50 -- you're likely holding the mouse anyway. On Unix machines with more keyboard-oriented UI, with say a tiling WM, things like bangs at browser address bar are a godsent. Of course it is nice on mobile too -- direct queries rather than hoppping around using clumsy touchscreen. There are likely browser extensions for this though, but none of them set DDG as their default search engine -- so just doing that manually also gives you the bangs so in my book DDG wins here ;)
- dash2 8y agoFirefox lets you set up search keywords, which to match the same thing. They used to be hidden away, but more recently they’ve got promoted a bit and are quite easy to set up.
- tordanik 8y agoFirefox search keywords are awesome! They can be much shorter than bangs because there's no need to avoid name conflicts with thousands of sites you aren't using. Plus, no exclamation mark, and you can use them for sites at work which aren't publicly visible.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoI don't get it, I've been using the native equivalent "forever", aka keywords, you just get to set your own, and don't need to use ! (but you can't put them at the end, which has utility on DDG).
- katet 8y agoIt does in fact support "site:xyz.com" queries, and displays a UI reminder that you're limiting results to that domain
- wool_gather 8y agoNice, thank you! Either I am an idiot (entirely possible), or this was added at some point and I never re-tried.
- clubm8 8y ago> Same, very happy using DDG. I hope they're becoming profitable. It's my understanding they are profitable, a large chunk being things like Amazon referrals (nontrackable). They may not have as many users but they also have much lower overhead since they don't need vast teams of engineers working on new ways of slicing and dicing data.
- simias 8y agoIt's true, English language results are good enough for me but I have to switch to Google when I want to search for something specifically in French.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- moritzsimon 8y agoI hope its another sign of rising privacy awareness ...
- barking 8y agoProbably a stupid question but am I correct in assuming that you might as well use Google as use ddg on chrome?
- wongarsu 8y agoOnly if you are logged into Chrome and sync your browsing history. Even then you still gain the non-privacy benefits like ddg not constructing filter bubbles (at least not to the extend of google)
- __s 8y agoExplain? Graph looks like you could say that at any point in time
- fogetti 8y agoCool. I am rooting for them to become even more successful.
- lucb1e 8y agoNowhere on the page does it say "exploding", OP is exaggerating what is roughly linear growth. I think the title should be edited. Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying this is not worth posting or should be taken down, just "exploding" does not even remotely describe DDG's traffic. The post was interesting, only OP's fabricated title is inaccurate. Edit 2: Several comments mention the graph does show daily searches, and is therefore showing exponential growth. My reason for thinking it's cumulative and not daily, is because it says below that the daily record is 29 million searches and that the cumulative number is 22.569 billion. When hovering over the last value in the graph, it shows 22.2 billion. For the record, the current title is "DuckDuckGo Usage is exploding right now".
- jwilcoxson 8y agoExploding might be an overstatement, but it did hit an all time high for daily queries this week.
- jypepin 8y agoI think you got it wrong. If I understand correctly the graph is showing daily searches, not cumulative
- rectang 8y ago+1 The submitted title "DuckDuckGo Usage is exploding right now" is editorializing and is against the HN site guidelines. It should be changed to the actual page title, "DuckDuckGo Traffic". ETA: I emailed the mods.
- patrickbolle 8y agoWoops.
- rectang 8y agoHeh. I'm rooting for DDG, too. Let's just fix, forget, and move on. :)
- maxwell 8y agoI changed my default from Google Search to DDG in February. Surprised by how little I’ve noticed the change, after nearly 20 years using Google. It feels more like the old Google that wasn’t stuffed with ads, and I find it superior for programming queries (aside from Angular 2+ docs). I still type in google.com and perform queries there a few times a week. I also turn to Google Images for copyleft photos, as DDG doesn’t seem to support filtering by license yet.
- csraghunandan 8y agoI've been using DuckDuckGo for almost a year now and for most of the cases, it's almost as good as google
- sbanach 8y agoGoogle claims 3.5 billion queries per day, so approaching 1% of that.
- cabaalis 8y agoI've switched all my devices to ddg and Firefox. Automatically logging me into Chrome was just emotionally too much, even if it did not send a single extra bit to Google. I miss the summary responses at the top of search results because they made Google much more of a reference. For example, defining words, quick view of Wikipedia results, etc. I do still use maps, for now.
- pard68 8y agoDitto. I need a Blink engine browser for work though, so I ended up switching to Vivaldi for work needs and I don't know why I didn't switch before this sign in fiasco...
- clubm8 8y agoOn the maps side of things, !osm searches open street map, which is not perfect but decent enough for many cases. (Satellite data + reviews are lacking, but if you're like me and look up cities you see named in the news it gets the job done)
- stinos 8y agoit gets the job done and for usage like you mention it's also way faster than !gm
- hiccuphippo 8y agoDdg has a tab for meanings that works similar, it's one more click but I don't know in which conditions it appears. They also show Wikipedia entries on the side with links to both Wikipedia and the official site when there's one which is quite convenient.
- cabaalis 8y agoThanks, it does seem to show up sometimes but maybe I'm just so used to seeing it in Google that I notice when it's absent.
- amelius 8y agoDDG, if you're reading this: I want to make the switch. But typing "!g" when a search does not return what I want is too clumsy. It requires 7 touch-events on mobile (including focus and space). Please make that simpler, and I will switch. (My suggestion would be to have a "!g" button at the bottom of the search results. Perhaps make it optional, depending on user-settings; I don't mind a cookie for just that.)
- cardamomo 8y agoWhy make it Google-specific? What if DDG could suggest from a range of other search engines that might give you better results based on the nature of your query?
- ThomPete 8y agoBecause you want to make the transition easy.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- r3bl 8y agoSome sort of a setting for displaying 3-5 frequently used bangs below the search bar would be nice.
- jononor 8y agoHaving buttons for "try this search on [Google] [Yandex]" could be useful data to collect for improving the search results.
- AsyncAwait 8y agoYes, however Google's results would be different for everyone, based on what Google knows about you.
- maxxxxx 8y agoI think there should a be a set of customer configurable (!!! Please no automatic assignment based on ML) buttons that add desired bangs to a search.
- phrixus 8y agoI love that they make their traffic numbers available. I have been using ddg and graphing/predicting the next days traffic since March here: https://qunc.co/ddg https://qunc.co/ddg. Definitely a different trajectory since late summer.
- Go0the0gophers 8y agoI prefer qwant
- MrQuincle 8y agoA while ago I switched to duckduckgo.com for a while until I applied for an ESTA visa and wasn't paying attention. I shouldn't have gone for the top result, I know... On my flight to the US my bank received already three fraudulent creditcard transactions. Banks from my country are very quick though and froze everything. However, it makes me realize personally that ranking algorithms are important, especially if you're in a hurry. PS: The governmental site is now at rank 1 on duckduckgo.
- marcosdumay 8y agoUnfortunately, I would advise against not paying attention. The amount of scamming sites on Google's ad-based front-page is much larger than DDG. There is really no place to run, the internet is a dangerous place.
- oth001 8y agoWhy not StartPage?
- vezycash 8y agoStartPage is barebones Google without the tracking.
- Kiro 8y agoDDG is barebones Bing without the tracking.
- jqgatsby 8y agoI think a lot of the people here raving about how great duckduckgo is do not understand that it's just a layer on top of Bing results. You could run Bing (or Google for that matter) in an incognito window and get the same effect. What I'd like to see is an ad-free search engine that is open-source or subscription-based. DDG doesn't solve any of the fundamental problems with the search ecosystem.
- patrickbolle 8y ago"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources,[45] including Yahoo! Search BOSS; Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha; Bing; its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); and others.[3][45][46] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate "Zero-click Info" boxes – grey boxes above the results that display topic summaries and related topics.[10]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview - https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
- Kiro 8y agoFrom your link: > In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing. So in other words all the traditional link results are from Bing and Yahoo. The other 400 sources and their own crawler are only for things like Instant Answer boxes at the top (which are great btw).
- raffael-vogler 8y agoI would like to switch but the search results for German language queries are too subpar as of now.
- mhb 8y agoIt would probably explode more if they would add the ability to search within the past year.
- ravenstine 8y agoThe results are good enough at that I use it exclusively now. In case y'all didn't know, DDG does some neat things like this: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=beautify+json&t=h_&ia=answer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=beautify+json&t=h_&ia=answer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qr+hello+hn&atb=v123-2__&ia=answer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qr+hello+hn&atb=v123-2__&ia=answer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=url+unescape+Hello%2520HN&atb=v123-2__&ia=answer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=url+unescape+Hello%2520HN&atb=v123... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=crontab+0+0+*+*+*+%2Fbin%2Fsh&atb=v123-2__&ia=answer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=crontab+0+0+*+*+*+%2Fbin%2Fsh&atb=...
- dljsjr 8y agoThe crontab parser is a thing of beauty
- themodelplumber 8y agoA babelfish for cron! It seems years too late in some ways, yet I have a funny feeling it will remain relevant for many years to come. Thank you.
- linkmotif 8y agoDDG is a most important project! But I like GCHQ Cyberchef for this kind of thing, but also the node REPL or browser tools console REPL are good. Nice to have everything in one spot versus different tools based on search input.
- severine 8y agoFor those like me, who didn't know: https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/ https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/
- nulbyte 8y agoI have been using DDG on my laptop for a while, now. These are some great examples of what it can do that I never knew! Thanks for sharing. That said, I have regularly made use of !g when the results were absolutely horrid. Often, it is when I am looking for something frustratingly specific that is named frustratly generic. So while I understand DDG's results, Google (scarily) understands me and gives me exactly what I want even for those only-a-geek moments.
- the_other_guy 8y agoSearch "go vs rust" and set the filter to the "past month" in both Google and DuckDuckGo. I can go on and on, but this is just a simple evidence of how inferior DuckDuckGo is. Also DuckDuckGo is incapable of indexing client-side rendered HTML which has become increasingly important over the past few years. EDIT: I would like to hear any logical response from those who downvote me
- kazen44 8y agoyou actually do not provide evidence for this. Mainly because google's searching is subjective. Your result for "go vs rust" might be entirely different from mine on google. mind you i don't actively use DDG, but them being privacy first, i assume they do not apply your prefence to search results this way. Duckduckgo seems very useful to getting out of the specific bubble google has created for in relation to your search history. (ps, i did not downvote you btw).
- the_other_guy 8y ago>you actually do not provide evidence for this I did, I listed 1 big evidence (the lack of indexing client-side rendered HTML), and also a simple example "rust vs go" that came to my mind. Take another example that I just tried, search "classical music only" in both engines and see the difference, this is a very popular youtube channel and has a website but nothing is shown in DDG for me. As much as I want to join you guys against the big fat lazy monopolist called Google, I can't just make myself blind and claim that DDG is anywhere near to Google when it comes to accuracy or sophistication. If you really appreciate privacy, why not try something like Startpage instead of hyping another for-profit company?
- kbenson 8y ago> I can't just make myself blind and claim that DDG is anywhere near to Google when it comes to accuracy or sophistication. You don't have to, that's what !g is for. I start all my searched at DDG, and if I'm not seeing the results I want, I use !g. Somewhere around 80%-90% never require a redirect to Google for additional results, and that's a a number I can live with.
- wpdev_63 8y agohi google!
- klancaster 8y agoExcept for searches on Google Scholar, ddg is my primary search engine. Very few times have I found that I get better results in Google.
- TheCoreh 8y agoI've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for almost a year now. I still need to resort to !g for about 1/3 of my queries, which is less than it used to be, so the quality is definitely improving. One weird thing that I noticed is that every so often when I'm in a Google SERP (e.g. in a friend's phone) and I'm not fully satisfied with the results, I add in !g, only to realize that makes no sense. So I wonder if there's a subset of queries that DDG produces better results for, or if Google's search quality is declining. If anyone from DDG is reading this: Please add the ability to (voluntarily) personalize search results via a cookie, just like you do for the interface theme. Something like "Programming Language: JavaScript". That way ambiguous queries (e.g "array reverse") can be associated with the specific context without having to type it every time (e.g. "array reverse js")
- utopcell 8y agoDDG cannot provide personalized results, because the service they are using to get results (from Bing) does not provide that feature.
- TheCoreh 8y agoThat's not necessarily true. They could use a classifier to figure out the subject of the query (e.g. programming, cooking, travel) and then modify the query sent to Bing or whatever backend they use. Bonus points if they actually expose this on the UI, in a way that allows you to remove the personalization "array reverse [JavaScript x]" "camping sites [Near Lake Tahoe x]"
- greglindahl 8y agoThat's what blekko did with slashtags, and you have to have your own index to do a good job of evaluating those queries.
- mcintyre1994 8y agoThey already do something like this because if you search "array reverse" or any programming question then you get a Q/A tab with stackoverflow almost always at the top.
- walterbell 8y agoThanks for the reminder, just realized that iOS on Safari offers DuckDuckGo as a search engine option, and that !sp can be used to proxy Google searches via Safari.
- dmitripopov 8y ago20 years ago Google Search was met with similar enthusiasm. I like DDG, but I don't see any reason why they would not pursue profits increase path once they become No 1 search engine.
- kumarvvr 8y agoTrue, but 20 years ago, people ill understood the troublesome effects of internet echo chambers. It might be short-sighted to look for the same signs with DDG. We might have to look out for a different class / type of threat.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- themodelplumber 8y agoI mean, it's not like "find a new favorite search engine every 15-20 years" is _that_ bad a situation.
- kumarvvr 8y agoI use DDG almost exclusively now. I do a lot of search and find on various tech and political topics and It has served me well. However, I wish the search engine space evolves into a more diverse set of competing companies.
- mattlondon 8y agoI have recently switched to Firefox, and have been using DDG now for some time both on desktop and mobile. In my experience Firefox + DDG is a viable alternative to Chrome + Google Search. Occasionally I still need to go for google, but for about 98% of the time I'd say DDG is a no-op drop-in replacement for Google. I highly recommend this browser & search engine combo - DDG is great now, and Firefox is now decent again after a while in the wilderness. Firefox also has some neat extensions like Google Container [1] that sandboxes all google cookies so you can still login to Gmail etc, but the cookies are not available for tracking elsewhere (e.g. analytics). I've recommended this add-on a lot recently - I've got no connection to it, just a satisfied user. 1 - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
- robertAngst 8y agoI have a very serious question about privacy that I dont want to be judged for. Should I switch if I do nothing wrong? I stopped downloading illegal videos and my porn is tame. What bad things can google do to me if I'm a user that doesnt care about privacy for myself?
- Kluny 8y agoFor me it's mostly that the ads are getting too good. Like, I look at raincoats on some site, then that site's raincoat ads follow me around for the next two weeks. I'm trying to be frugal and not buy more stuff that I don't need, but the ads actually get to me after a while. Adblock helps, but sometimes I have to turn it off for my work (web development).
- KAMSPioneer 8y agoI think there are a ton of very well-spoken arguments for why everyone, yes even those who "do nothing wrong," should care about privacy, and I would encourage you to look at those. Mostly because the people who publicly speak about this are much more eloquent than I, and have thought much more on the topic. That said, I think it boils down to this: we all want privacy, but digital privacy is a hard problem because we are not "wired" to understand it. Humans are not good at interacting with systems with perfect memory, huge computational power, and extremely insightful statistical modeling capabilities. This affects us differently than interacting with a person. Now, a machine can categorize you automatically based on political beliefs, religious beliefs, friend networks, conversational style, etc. This can be used to target you for (arguably unethical) influence via surgically targeted propaganda, or to retroactively mark you as a dissident in a tyrannical regime based on a comment you made off-hand years before the regime took power. Left unchecked, these invasive tracking systems could be used for a myriad of unethical purposes. And even if you "do nothing wrong," it's important to remember that in most legal systems, it's very difficult to lead a normal life and never break any laws. Add to that the very, very long records these systems are capable of keeping on you, and I think it's clear why many people, myself included, wish to minimize our presence on platforms such as Google.
- danShumway 8y agoA really underrated feature of DuckDuckGo is the number/quality of search cards[0]. A lot of Google's search cards just kind of pull from whatever the top result is -- but DuckDuckGo's all have specific algorithms which makes them more predictable. With Google, I have to take an extra second to think about why they're showing an answer at the top. But if DuckDuckGo inlines an answer from StackOverflow, I know what the algorithm is --> Get top-rated StackOverflow result, get highest rated answer, inline the first X paragraphs, give a button to expand. I still occasionally use !g for some searches if I strike out finding answers on DuckDuckGo, but I'm at the point where I generally prefer DuckDuckGo's answers. It's really tough to explain what's different about them, it feels like DuckDuckGo has a different "style" of search results or something. Even when I'm using Google, I usually have DuckDuckGo open next to it, because Google and DuckDuckGo feel like they cover different ground. It's just that by default, the ground that DuckDuckGo is covering feels more relevant for just very quickly getting information and then getting out (especially with the better search cards). [0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+char+codes&t=canonical&ia=answer&iax=answer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+char+codes&t=canonical&...
- londons_explore 8y ago> I know what the algorithm is --> Get top-rated StackOverflow result, get highest rated answer, inline the first X paragraphs, give a button to expand. Google couldn't do that due to past court decisions about the maximum they can show being 'snippet length' without getting further into disputed copyright territory. I expect they're working on AI tech which can read the whole web and directly answer your questions rather than having to use an extract of a webpage at all.
- mycall 8y ago> I expect they're working on AI tech which can read the whole web and directly answer your questions rather than having to use an extract of a webpage at all. GDELT
- danShumway 8y ago> I expect they're working on AI tech But that's exactly the problem. Google already will try to auto-answer some questions that you ask. But the way they do it is completely opaque. So I have no idea a) when they'll suggest an answer, and b) why they'll suggest an answer. When I see an answer on DuckDuckGo, it's consistent. I immediately know how much trust to put into it. I don't have to look for the source and try to figure out where it sits on that scale. What's even better is that over time with DuckDuckGo, I get better at phrasing queries in a way that I know an instant answer will pop up. With Google, because they probably already use a bunch of weird AI in the background, I have never been able to predict whether or not a query will pop up a card, so I can't actually rely on getting an answer quickly in advance. These are tiny things that shave time off of my searches. I often use DuckDuckGo's StackOverflow cards as language references -- to be able to say, "hey, jog my memory with a really quick example of this syntax."[0][1] I want to know details like the source of that answer before I search it. AI tech will never be as good as having a consistent algorithm for this -- because even if it got to be as good as a person going out and looking up the answers for me, a person is never going to be as good as a consistent algorithm. This is what people don't understand about natural language interpretation -- they think that there's some theoretical end-point where a computer will be as good at interpreting commands as a human is. But they forget that giving a human commands is already slower and less reliable than giving a computer commands. Having a digital assistant be ridged and predictable is a strength, not a weakness. [0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=js+send+a+network+request&t=canonical&ia=qa https://duckduckgo.com/?q=js+send+a+network+request&t=canoni... [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stackoverflow+linux+find+filename&t=canonical&ia=qa&iax=qa https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stackoverflow+linux+find+filename&...
- shams93 8y agoIt's really the best display of what gifted modern developers can do with Perl and why Perl is actually still a uniquely powerful language.
- walterbell 8y agoAny reference on DDG's use of Perl, e.g. which Perl version/VM, libraries and frameworks they use? Edit: 2009 architecture blog post, https://web.archive.org/web/20130225033410/http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-architecture.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130225033410/http://www.gabrie...
- kbenson 8y agoA little searching and reading on /r/perl yielded this.[1] 1: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/DuckDuckGoPerl https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/DuckDuckGoPerl
- notriddle 8y agoMeh. DuckDuckGo's modest success has nothing to do with Perl. It could've been done in PHP just fine.
- nebulous1 8y agoAlright, I'm going to give it another go. Tried a few years back and ended up !g to the end of almost every search I liked all the other functionality a lot, but the results themselves just didn't work for me.
- HeadsUpHigh 8y agoI find that duckduckgo is more easily tricked by SEO compared to google when it comes to long searches. Other than that I use it exclusively. After a few months of use I've gotten to a point that I subconsciously know which searches will need a g! before I even search them( I've confirmed this multiple times as well).
- freediver 8y agoCan you give a few examples of those?
- HeadsUpHigh 8y agoThe last one I can find from my history is this: I was looking for a company developing intraocular lenses that are better than a healthy human one but I couldn't remember the company's name. My search was artificial lenses better than human Google gave me the company name on it's 3rd result description but duckduckgo gave me irrelevant stuff all the way down. That was yesterday. Today duckduckgo gives me the company name on the description of the second result. So it's pretty volatile I guess.
- bitL 8y agoI've noticed recently that there are already sites trying to game DDG and their results show up among first for some obscure searches, but nowhere else. I guess that's price for popularity.
- metildaa 8y agoIts a sign that DDG's search traffic has value, which is a great change from just a few years ago. I tried to use DuckDuckGo, but even still I feel its results are not up to par with Google, despite Google's results sliding in quality year after year. Qwant has been a decent supplement, the results for general queries are good and on the more specific ones (part numbers, key terms from papers and articles) its equal to or better than Yahoo/Bing. On specific queries, Google has really dropped the ball. Part numbers get ignored or rewritten, and results are just plain missing (despite other search engines having those key results).
- markatkinson 8y agoI switched a week ago! But I must say I still have to hitup Google quite often, the search results are not as good.
- azatris 8y agoI wish this had better branding. You can't say "just DuckDuckGo it". It has to have a single, or at most a double-syllable name that is easy to remember. Like Google or Bing. But maybe it's part of some sort of strategy where in the early years the branding is weird in order to gain notoriety, and then change it when the timing is right. I think right now this is probably slowing growth. I wonder how much would duck.com cost.
- wepple 8y agoI wonder if we can’t just all move toward “search”. It’s usually obvious from context, and with more and more search engines (whether they be whole-web or isolated to a given social network), it seems like a viable alternative.
- sudojudo 8y agoI'd rephrase that as moving back toward search. Google wasn't always there, and even after it became popular, some time passed before the name was used as a verb. Personally, I Ask Jeeves to Lycos it.
- mettamage 8y agoPeople get creative if they want to. I can imagine people saying just duck it. Or "see if you can find a quack." (ok that one probably not) Point being, if it really gets wildly popular it still might be translated into a verb.
- gingericha 8y ago“Just duck it“?
- themodelplumber 8y agoWaddle it
- wes-k 8y ago"let me just duck that for you" I'm in!
- Simon_says 8y agoWhat is DDG's business model?
- herodotus 8y agoThey display search-related ads, but they do not track you, or forward your search results to someone else.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoAs we, on HN, were song for the ride to done extent I got the impression that Weinberg (sp?) was doing it for idealistic reasons rather than having a business model to start with. Anyone know what headcount they're working with now?
- gcb0 8y agoironically instead of just giving me a link, now dyckduckgo results list will track me to known which link I clicked. this is the beginning of the end for duckduckgo :(
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y agoWhat is DDG’s business model?
- leoxvi 8y agoAdvertising (MS Bing + Yahoo) and affiliate-linking (Amazon): https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates I hope DDG becomes smarter with AI-assisted searching, eg. by doing semantic sentence encoded searching, like Google Books showed a while back: https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=best%20search%20engines& https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=best%20search%2...
- utopcell 8y agoThey show you ads
- resonious 8y agoThey sell keyword-based ads. [1] [1] https://www.quora.com/How-does-DuckDuckGo-make-money https://www.quora.com/How-does-DuckDuckGo-make-money
- funkythings 8y agoI really want to love DuckDuckGo, but for programming things I search for the results are simply to weak.
- OnlyLys 8y agoI am inclined to agree. I've tried DDG a few times for programming stuff and the results were less satisfactory compared to Google. And actually in general, when I do searches with abstract keywords, Google gets the meaning far better than DDG. For example, earlier today I was thinking about the mess that is USB-C standards. I decided to search for Reddit articles through the search phrase 'USB C mess site:reddit.com'. On Google all of the first 10 results were exactly what I want. But on Duckduckgo, only the second and fifth results out of the first 10 were what I want.
- anoplus 8y agoI decided to switch to firefox and DDG this week after seeing post on Chrome's new cookies policy. The post helped me be more aware and affected my choice.
- bit_4l 8y agoDDG has been waiting for this moment for quite a long time.
- sv12l 8y agoI too made a switch a week ago to Firefox + DDG, working well so far.
- 0xmohit 8y agoI've been using DDG for a couple of years now and never feel like using any other search engine for "better" results. Bangs are a really cool feature. https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang Not to mention instant answers. https://duck.co/help/features/instant-answers-and-other-features https://duck.co/help/features/instant-answers-and-other-feat...
- vfinn 8y agoDDG is the default search engine in Tor browser, which explains at least my personal DDG usage. Google is also becoming less likeable as a whole, and people in general are more concerned about their privacy than before.
- 4ad 8y agoIt's good for everyone that DDG usage is increasing, however, the lack of any kinks, sudden slope increases in the graph tells me weren't any particular set of events that caused people to switch. Rather, they got "fed up with google" at their own pace, and it wasn't any one particular thing that Google did that caused a mass exodus. That's sad, really, because it means people as a large group don't care about any particular anti-privacy thing that Google did. I would be interesting to see in a few months whether the current Chrome fiasco will have had any effect, but I doubt it.
- leoxvi 8y agoDon't think so. Lately Google has really messed with the trust of their Chrome & Chromium users. I switched to Firefox + DDG recently, and I don't think I'm alone with this action. Switching takes only a few minutes and is really worth it IMHO.
- Springtime 8y agoA combination of Google's results degrading so miserably in the last few years and DDG's improvement to image search results (more pages of them and better filtering options) led me to use it much more regularly. At this point it's less that DDG has noticeably better results now but rather Google's results for enough queries are useless to me that some alternative may as well be used. Edit: edited out digression on the quality of Google's results since it's hardly anything that hasn't been written about prior.
- mynameishere 8y agoAnd people trust XYZ website because? Okay, whatever reasons you have, I deny. They want money, and they'll take it as it comes like anyone else. Quit being a sap. But in any case it's really creepy how every time this website is mentioned its whole marketing department seems to show up. "I use DDG exclusively now..." Good for you.
- the_other_guy 8y agoI know why you're being downvoted, I am sure it's a pure conicidence this website is being shilled very hard in Reddit and HN over the past 24 hours :D
- jqgatsby 8y agoThat's an astute observation. Can you add a link?
- the_other_guy 8y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9jg8mg/duckduckgo_usage_is_exploding_right_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9jg8mg/duckduckgo_us...
- patrickbolle 8y agoHah, I posted this because I saw it on Reddit and realized nobody had posted it on HN yet. I wish I was getting paid to shill companies, that would be fantastic!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoIt was developed in the open, with regular updates here. Probably many here feel part of it somehow, and trust Weinberg because of that virtual relationship. Of course one doesn't know, Weinberg might secretly be one of the lizard people, co-opted by a TLA to covertly monitor search ... probably in order to quash evidence of alien sightings. Joking aside, you're right to be skeptical.
- flowardnut 8y agoI've tried it, and wasn't pleased with search results. I'd consistently try vague searches, not find it on DDG, but it'd be the top result on Google. I'll give it another swing, we need some viable alternatives.
- brentadamson 8y agohttps://jivesearch.com/ https://jivesearch.com/. I run it and made an update this week that greatly improved our search results. 100% open source, has all the !bangs and tons of instant answers.
- gjm11 8y agoSo, I set Firefox to use DDG rather than Google as its default search engine a little while ago. And, reading this discussion, I realised that I'd like to see a complete list of "bang" searches DDG knows how to do. Putting "duckduckgo bang" into DDG itself produces results that are ... not helpful. At any rate, nothing on the first page looks like it has any chance of answering the question. But "!g duckduckgo bang" gives me https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang as the first hit (this is a high-level description of the bang feature), followed by https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html (which has the actual complete list right there), followed by someone's list of the 25 allegedly-most-useful DDG bangs. Most of the rest of the first-page hits are also informative -- they're things like Reddit and HN discussions of the bang features. I think this is actually the clearest case I've seen since switching to DDG where Google had demonstrably more useful results. Which is kinda ironic.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Const-me 8y agoI've asked that query. DDG showed a gray panel at the very top of the resut page, saying "Search thousands of sites directly from DuckDuckGo. Learn more about !bangs (or submit a new one!)"
- gjm11 8y agoHuh. It's there for me too, now I actually look. I guess I've learned to ignore banner-shaped things at the top of web pages. [EDITED to add:] Actually, I seem to get it for "duckduckgo bangs" and for "bang duckduckgo" but not for "duckduckgo bang". But I'm not sure it's consistent from one search to the next. Anyway, I think the reason I didn't see it before is that it wasn't there, not that I'm banner-blind.
- tomsmeding 8y agoI actually do get it for "duckduckgo bang". Maybe they're hotfixing it, or maybe some self-learning algorithm decided that this was close enough to "duckduckgo bangs"? Shooting in the dark here.
- needle0 8y agoWrote this before and writing again, but DDG is abysmal when it comes to non-English language searches, at least according to my experience with using it in Japanese. I’ve switched to StartPage in places where I can (unfortunately SP isn’t in the default search engine list of many mobile browsers). Perhaps in English it’s good enough to not prepend every search with !g, but it’s still quite far from that point in JP. I keep wondering what kind of staffing they have for improving non-English language searches, if any at all.
- blendo 8y agoAbout six months ago, Google began presenting unsolvable Captchas on iOS/Safari while using a VPN (Private Internet Access). DDG just works.
- danielecook 8y agoIf you have not used it and are a developer, you should check it out. It integrates stackoverflow answers which I have found to be very helpful. The results have been good enough about 90% of the time. In rare cases where they are not you can add a !g to your query and it will return the google results.
- ajcodez 8y agoI was using DuckDuckGo for a day or two due to Google latency issues. I’m would check again in a couple days to make sure it’s permanent growth.
- ZiggyCrane 8y agoYeah, I would use it if they change their name. IT feels like kid came up with it.
- mario0b1 8y ago> I would use it if they change their name. Sure, the name might not be the catchiest one, but shouldn't be things like ethics, usability/functionality and so on way above this? Dropping something because it has a bad name seems odd. Even if it has a ""bad"" name, people would come up with a catchy phrase for it sooner or later. It just has to get rolling - for which the name might be contra productive, that's right.
- TheCoreh 8y agoAs opposed to Google, a name that came from a spelling mistake? https://www.webcitation.org/68ubHzYs7?url=http://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html https://www.webcitation.org/68ubHzYs7?url=http://graphics.st... Or Bing, an onomatopoeia? https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Microsoft-name-their-search-engine-Bing https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Microsoft-name-their-search-en...
- mogadsheu 8y agoI sense this is a general trend away from big tech and back towards the earlier days of a less centrally driven internet. It's kind of a nice reminder of how competitive and dynamic the internet really is. I hope it can stay that way with Net Neutrality.
- abrowne 8y agoI'd tried DDG a while back and Google seemed massively better, but I've been more impressed lately. The "bangs" feature never appealed to me much because I already have ~25 custom search engines in Firefox that I have keywords set to. I've been trying Qwant (Lite) recently as a Google alternative, and it's pretty good, but I find myself searching for the things like "500 mxn in usd" or "30 days from 29 sep 2018, and Qwant doesn't answer these. It looks like DDG's "instant answers" does do this, so I'm going to try it again. I also like the appearance options, such as setting your own font, so I can use Source Sans Pro, and that it shows a MapBox/OpenStreetMap map, but you can set it to open directions in Google (or Bing or OSM).
- BeetleB 8y agoI also suggest trying searx: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ You can use one of the online instances (with no guarantees on privacy), or just host it yourself. I set it up on my PC recently and it's "good enough" for me. Furthermore it likely has more features than DDG and startpage.
- brentadamson 8y agoAnother option to self host is https://jivesearch.com/ https://jivesearch.com/. Has !bangs and instant answers, etc. I run it and am happy to answer any questions.
- tjoff 8y agoInspires hope :) I realize I'm unsure what DDGs main source of income is? Still ads but not personalized?
- amelius 8y agoAt least they seem to have more monetization options than Wikipedia, which has no ads at all. Also, ads related to the current query can be considered personalized.
- carlospwk 8y agoThe strength of privacy on DDG is also its weakness. Since everyone gets the same results on all searches, there is no localization to any of it. I gave it a try earlier this year but just couldn’t make it work and switched back to Google.
- climb_stealth 8y agoI found that setting the country in the top left corner helps a lot.
- carlospwk 8y agoI didn't realize there was a setting like that, thanks!
- mrcnkoba 8y agoI'm really amazed by the adoption of DDG by HN crowd. It's totally unusable for me. I can barely find stuff and I have to resort to google in 95% of cases. Do I have to relearn how to goo.. scratch that, duck duck go stuff?
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoIt's been at least a year since I gave it a serious go, but despite being onboard with the effort I just ended up adding !g to every search and wasn't feeling idealistic enough about search to do that. It has improved (UX-wise at least), I've used it occasionally, hope it's also getting better with search -- Google is certainly getting much worse.
- stinos 8y agoDo I have to relearn how to goo.. Sort of, yes. See other comments around here as well. It's like Google without the backend which knows your habits and bubble and tries to be smart (and succeeds, often) and figures out what you want to search for despite you being a bit vague. DDG doesn't do that so, like in the old days, you have to be specific. Like if you talk to a person and ask a question: you also don't ask 'pasta?'. You ask 'where can I buy pasta' for instance.
- sonar_un 8y agoI am with you on this. I find DDG completely unusable. The kinds of things that I search for are generally daily or weekly recent items and DDG never gets this stuff indexed quickly enough. Not even from the largest papers. I am sure it’s fine for more evergreen content like SO, but for current news it’s awful.
- stinos 8y agoI am with you on this. I find DDG completely unusable Ha but my point was just to explain how it works. I've been using DDG for years and find it extremely usable :)
- _eht 8y agoWhen can I get my privacy first @duckduckgo email address?
- notriddle 8y agoAt protonmail.com At least, DDG themselves recommend it.
- hnruss 8y agoI’ve heard the same complaint about the results a lot, but I’ve never understood it. I have never noticed much of a difference. Does anyone have concrete examples of search queries that Google returns more accurate results for?
- elvirs 8y agojust installed it on firefox. searched for myself, not really impressed with relevancy of the results but it did surface pages that I had not seen on first two pages of google. so im guessing its not really a replacement to google but a decent alternative
- mattmanser 8y agoI use DDG on my phone, still Google on my desktop. While there are a lot of things to like about DDG, the searches are still pretty rubbish. What's worst about DDG is that it is absolutely useless at location searches. The one that really bugs me is "Nottingham Weather". Location set to UK, yet it returns the weather for White March, MD Nottingham, population 700,000, but somehow a road in White Marsh, MD, America, population 9,513, is the result it shows. If I'm searching a venue, pub, club, etc. with United Kingdom set, it usually returns US bars or venues with the same name. Anything technical Google is also much better at filtering the dross and returning something meaningful, though that might be because it's learnt the programming languages, etc. I use.
- shaklee3 8y agoThe UK location came up first for me. Have you tried it recently?
- mattmanser 8y agoYes, do you have quick answers turned off?
- shaklee3 8y agoI was just using the default mode. I've only used ddg once, so I should have no settings.
- conquistadog 8y agoIs there a way to exclude results that don't actually contain all of the search terms? For example, results for +chicken +neutrino should not include this [1] because the word chicken isn't there. Quotes and plus signs both fail this everywhere I know of in 2018. [1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/once-again-physicists-debunk-faster-light-neutrinos https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/once-again-physicist...
- askaboutit 8y agoStill use google for “150 usd to cad” conversions. Use it for translation. Use it for relevant news. Use it for accurate localized searches. Use it for finding relevant sourcing of companies. Calling DuckDuckGo a replacement of google is no where near right. Bing is more relevant. And people seem to hate on Bing. The only reason people love DuckDuckGo is because of the perceived privacy. But the NSA blows that right away.
- jonahx 8y ago> But the NSA blows that right away. Can you elaborate on this?
- askaboutit 8y agoThe servers used to return your results most likely made with intel hardware (known backdoors or open holes). Sophisticated, even mind blowing levels of encryption breaking and penetration. If you think your data is encrypted online, or that it can’t be traced at every step. You’re wrong. There is no privacy on the internet. The best privacy we all have is the power button. Then you walk outside and facial recognition takes over. Privacy is dead.
- jstanley 8y agoI don't get this kind of reasoning. Google isn't the NSA. Even if the NSA see everything, they still see it if you use Google instead of DuckDuckGo. But Google don't see anything you do with DuckDuckGo. There are only upsides to using DuckDuckGo.
- askaboutit 8y agoIt’s also far slower to resolve queries and returning information. Doesn’t work without JavaScript. Needs !g for a lot of things. Wish it could be a google replacement but traffic or not. It ain’t.
- ktosobcy 8y ago> 150 usd to cad Works in DDG :-)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- beefman 8y agoI like how none of the events called out on the chart had any noticeable effect.
- dwighttk 8y agoThe bangs I use most often are !az and !w For a long time I used !img a lot, but they've incorporated native image search so I use it less. I never used !g much, (not counting !img), but I can't remember the last time I used it.
- djhworld 8y agoI use DDG as my daily driver. Shamefully I don't make extensive use of the features though (e.g. bangs etc), mainly because I forget them. It's a great search engine though and just gets out of the way to the point where I don't really think about it.
- pi-squared 8y agoI'm happy to switch to DDG from Evil Google, but what stops them from becoming as "evil" as Google at some point? It's a for-profit organization relying on ads and sure - its selling point now is privacy but other than the word of the author, what else is there that at some point when it grows enough it won't start to slowly break that promise? Why is it not open source/federated? Why has it stopped the DuckDuckHack project (which was the bit that was open source)? This is probably the one search engine that has been able to gain a lot of privacy-centered/hacky individuals mostly (I think, may be wrong) through marketing/PR. If the causes are really that privacy centered, why not restructure it as non-profit + open source + decentralized? Not saying it's easy, but the marketing part (which I consider equally or even more difficult - see Bing with all MS budget and efforts), has already gathered a lot of interest for such a project.
- brentadamson 8y agoI'm with you! I've been developing https://jivesearch.com/ https://jivesearch.com/, which is basically an open source version of DDG. Has all the !bangs and tons of instant answers. The best part is that if you are paranoid about privacy or don't trust me for some reason you can leave me out of the equation and run it yourself. Would love your feedback on it.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoAs a search alternative I've really enjoyed using searx [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx ] instances for the past 6 months or so. Searx, like DDG, aggregates from search providers including Google, Bing, (Wikipedia, DDG, etc.)b ut you can customise it to control exactly which search providers it pulls from. And it has !shortcuts to quickly specify individual search providers, like !ddg for DDG. Source code available: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
- reaperducer 8y agoI was using Duck Duck Go exclusively on all of my Macs, but I'm back to Google. The reason for the change is that Duck Duck Go disabled its tracker blocking in Safari. I read the explanation from DDG's web site, and it seemed to boil down to something like the new version of Safari would require people to opt-in to DDG's tracker blocking, and since that would be confusing for people, it's gone. Well, anti-tracking is the whole reason people use DDG, both the search engine, and the privacy plug-in. I hope someone else steps up to the plate.
- class4behavior 8y ago>and since that would be confusing for people, it's gone. Not sure what text you've read, but they've removed the feature because Safari 12 disables the entire extension when it discovers the API calls related to that function. Furthermore tracker blocking is not part of the search engine and definitely not the reason why people switch to DDG, but the extension only. And it is redundant on browsers that offer it themselves or when other extensions include that function.
- EastSmith 8y agoMy son saw me using DDG instead of Google, asked me about it and one week later I saw he had installed it on his laptop. He also tells everyone at his school about DDG.
- consultSKI 8y agoLove it. It's on all my devices.
- josteink 8y agoI like how the stats are numbers and just that. No creepy segmentation or deep analysis of the privacy-invading kind like Google and Facebook. Go DDG!
- Zarath 8y agoI've been slowly switching over. It's now the default search engine on both my phone, laptop, and desktop. There are still certain queries where I instinctively use google because I have a feeling they will be better for what I need. I was looking to make the switch for a while but had trouble breaking the habit. I found slowly switching each device over was the best way.
- fmajid 8y agoI’ve been using DDG for 8 years now based on Salvatore Sanfilippo’s (of Redis fame) recommendation, but unlike him I hardly ever resort to !google https://usesthis.com/interviews/salvatore.sanfilippo/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/salvatore.sanfilippo/
- tyjen 8y agoI've used Google to search for as far as I can remember, but recently switched to DuckDuckGo completely. Sorry, but the politicization of Google and the privacy issues are too much to ignore anymore.
- jstanley 8y agoI think it's absolutely fascinating how different people's opinions of DDG are. Personally I find it perfectly adequate and I literally never resort to searching on Google. Lots of people in this thread agree, but lots of others totally disagree. What is so different about different people's search habits that make it good enough for some but not for otherS?
- tills13 8y ago+1. It's overall adequate for the average query but it falls completely flat too often where a similar Google search returns exactly what you're looking for.
- teabee89 8y agoThe chart should either have a title with "Number of Direct Queries" and Y-axis numbers such as "20M", or keep the title "Direct Queries in Millions" and have Y-axis numbers simply be "20".
- grimgrin 8y agoSince this is a DDG thread, I just wanna highlight a thing I did in vim recently Using vim you may know you can define the `keywordprg` to use when pressing `K` on a word (in command mode). This is going to, if able, show you some form of documentation Python is already using `pydoc` in this case. I wanted something for the other instances, and I wanted to try getting DDG to be an ok solution, since it has that Q&A view. Here's what I ended up with (for now, surely evolving -- not perfect) note: you could put this in a ftdetect/javascript or whatever directory, but this is to be generalized for my case, and so I use an autocmd: autocmd Filetype * if &ft!="python" && &ft!="vim" \ | let &l:keywordprg=fnamemodify($MYVIMRC, ":h") . "/search.sh " . &l:filetype | endif Sorta ugly but hey, I don't want to overwrite the keywordprg used by python and vim (if you're parsing a vim plugin you did not write, you may want to press K on a thing to understand what it is) And in your your vimrc's root you'll need `search.sh` with these contents: # searches the filetype & keyword # in case of multiple filetypes (javascript.jsx) we just use the first firefox "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=$(echo $1| cut -d'.' -f1)+$2" Cool, now press K on a thing and assuming you use firefox, hopefully the results are OK, heh. It could be improved. As an example I just pressed `K` on the word `import` in a `javascript` file: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+import&atb=v132-3_j&ia=qa https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+import&atb=v132-3_j&ia=... If you're using another browser, you could probably just use `x-www-browser` in place of firefox, to launch your default browser (in the case of linux)
- FullMetalBitch 8y agoI have been using ddg for a long time and I can't be happier with it, at first I used !g a lot but now I search it all on ddg with the ocassional visit to startpage.
- trts 8y agoYesterday my dad mentioned off-hand that he had switched to duckduckgo. While they are still less than a rounding error of all search traffic (this site says Google itself has 3.5bn daily searches https://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/ https://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/), it interested me to know that someone I know outside of the technosphere had learned about it and decided to change due to its privacy merits. Also makes me wonder if the implication is that DDG may be poised to become the choice among older, conservative users and whether that will influence the way it markets itself.
- dpcan 8y agoSerious question: why does everyone trust DuckDuckGo?
- fghtr 8y agoTrust is not a boolean (trust / no trust). We trust DDG more than Google and that's enough. Also, their official privacy policy says they do not track: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy https://duckduckgo.com/privacy while Google admits permanent tracking.
- tills13 8y agoI think where Google really shines (in addition to its personalized results) is tackling _vague_ searches with ease. The other day, I couldn't remember what the title of a food-y documentary show I had watched on Netflix was - so I googled "netflix food show asian host." It's the first result on Google and a direct link to its Netflix page (as opposed to a blog or something). On DuckDuckGo, it's not listed at all. There's definitely room for improvement. While 20m searches per day is impressive in a vacuum, it's more or less a rounding error on Google's numbers.
- gerenuk 8y agoCurious how much data they are covering and what kind of stack is powering DuckDuckGo? Anyone knows in-depth except highscalability article.
- Kiro 8y agoNone, they get all their results from Bing. Stack is Perl though.
- mclightning 8y agoI just encountered this as I was having issues with google results. I thought maybe something is wrong with google and people are switching yo duckduckgo. Seriously I just searched something on google and second page of results are total crap. When I switch to duckduckgo with same keywords I get relevant results. For the record, keyword I was searching for was "first man curiositystream", on Google I get a bunch of fake websites on second page of results, sited with lots of random words in description for seo hacks.
- GuyPostington 8y agoI had no idea that DDG was Perl based. This gives me a whole new level of respect for DDG.
- stockkid 8y agoI love DDG! It's been my main search engine for some time now. But sometimes when I am searching for a solution for complex problems, I fall back to google by using `g!` because that, time and again, seems to take me to the answers faster.
- dreix 8y agoI'd use it daily if there wasn't such a lag after each query. Google works instantly ddg takes about 2 seconds to return results
- jacksmith21006 8y agoDo a search on "duckduckgo" on Google and you get an ad for DDG. Kind of interesting Google allows a search. DDG still not showing up with any market share. http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share No clear business model for DDG so be careful sharing your data.
- lazypenguin 8y agoDDG works well for me in 90% of cases. Sometimes when I am searching an obscure technical issue I revert back to Google. However the biggest feature that is missing for me is custom date range searches. Google has a "1 year search" and a "custom range" search while DDG only goes up to 1 month. It would be helpful when I am searching for more current information but need a bigger range than 1 month.
- rick22 8y agoGoogle is becoming very much anti-anonymous. Its not possible to create gmail account anymore without phone number. Wish there is something like DDG for gmail.
- fillipvt 8y agoAww this is such great news. Didn't know how I missed it. Really nice to see privacy being relevant to more people. Been using since 2016 and the results have improved tremendously!