12 ms·

For the team here at DuckDuckGo, we were excited not only to hit 14M searches in a single day but to also cross the threshold of 10B total private searches serv

• themihai 10y ago
  Did you consider changing the domain name?
  • muninn_ 10y ago
    This is the biggest turn off for me for the service. I use it, because I like it, but I really don't like the name.
    • dchuk 10y ago
      If you use it, and like it, why does the name matter anymore? Is it an embarrassment thing?
      • eganist 10y ago
        Google is basically a verb at this point. It's hard to tell people to DuckDuckGo it. GoDuck might be interesting. "GoDuck it."
        • AdamSC1 10y ago
          You could return to the neutral non-branded term of 'search' it.
          • tyingq 10y ago
            I believe the idea is to be more of a guerrilla evangelist for DDG, but the brand name makes that hard.
          • Perseids 10y ago
            Even better: You can work an making "google" a generic term for searching – "I'm googling it on DuckDuckGo" – which increases awareness of other search engines and decreases the association of the common activity "googling" with the company "Google".
      • muninn_ 10y ago
        Nah just bugs me. Like you wouldn't drive a DuckDuckGo mobile right?
      • themihai 10y ago
        It's just too much to type.
        • rocky1138 10y ago
          I think it's been several years since I've actually visited duckduckgo.com. Modern browsers make it really easy to set DDG to your default search engine.
          • agumonkey 10y ago
            Yeah but I often use other computers. I often thought about having a shorter name under elinks for instance.
          • themihai 10y ago
            People often want to try it for a while before to set it as default. Same happened to me when I changed my default browser. All being said I think a rebranding would make it more competitive.
        • Spivak 10y ago
          There's always https://ddg.co https://ddg.co or https://ddg.gg https://ddg.gg
        • update 10y ago
          ddg.com
    • lmedinas 10y ago
      Have you tried ddg.gg ?
      • glaberficken 10y ago
        oh! nifty shortcut, thanks =)
      • agumonkey 10y ago
        thx
    • csharpminor 10y ago
      I've been using DuckDuckGo for the past year and love it. But this also gets me. I've been trying to evangelize with my colleagues and friends and the whole duck thing makes it hard for them to take seriously. One friend said the logo reminded them of Aflac. And then all of a sudden we're talking about a duck instead of why private search is important.
• libraryatnight 10y ago
  Thank you for a great search engine! I swapped from Google as a default search to your guys' engine just shy of a year ago and haven't looked back. Keep up the great work :)
  • JoelTheSuperior 10y ago
    A thousand times this. Initially I wasn't a fan if I'm perfectly honest, but once I got my head around such brilliant things as the bang syntax I've been finding Google almost awkward to use by comparison. Being able to search Wikipedia with !w is brilliant.
    • throwaway91111 10y ago
      This is built into most browsers--you don't need to forward the query through a third party.
      • nitrogen 10y ago
        For the curious, that's what the search "keyword" is for. Over time, Firefox has made it harder to add new search engines and find/modify their settings, but it definitely still works.
• hrjet 10y ago
  From a privacy point of view, it would be awesome if you stabilise the NoJS version of your search page: https://duckduckgo.com/html/ https://duckduckgo.com/html/ * The above landing page doesn't work (typing a query and pressing enter returns me back to the same page). * Even if I manually enter a search URL like this https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=test https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=test it doesn't fully work (page navigation and requerying is broken).
  • MaxLeiter 10y ago
    Interesting, it works fine for me. What browser are you using?
    • hrjet 10y ago
      Chromium with uMatrix installed. (exact versions irrelevant, because it hasn't been working for me since atleast 2 years)
  • wanda 10y ago
    Like MaxLeiter, this page works normally for me, so I thought I would do a bit of testing. I know this is a plain HTML version of DDG and no AJAX is involved, but bear with me, I want to illustrate a point. From the browser console, the origin is that of the web page you're currently viewing, so you're free from CORS concerns. So, from my browser console in Chrome 56, with duckduckgo.com/html/ open in the browser tab, I should be able to do this without any trouble: fetch(window.location, { method: 'POST', body: 'q=testddg' }) .then(result => { result.text() .then(text => { document.documentElement.innerHTML = new DOMParser() .parseFromString(text, 'text/html') .documentElement.innerHTML }) }) But, surprise surprise, it doesn't work. There's no change in the document, where I'd obviously expect to see the search results page loaded, because the response was the home page -- as it is in your case, when you try to search for stuff. So I tried to make a POST request without a body instead, appending the query parameter to the URL as one would with a GET request: fetch(window.location + '?q=testddg', { method: 'POST' }) .then(result => { result.text() .then(text => { document.documentElement.innerHTML = new DOMParser() .parseFromString(text, 'text/html') .documentElement.innerHTML }) }) This worked perfectly, all the search results were loaded. Works as a plain GET request too. So what we seem to be able to surmise is that posting a request body causes the search to be rejected... But that's absurd! The native submit behaviour of a form with method 'POST' necessarily sends a POST request with a body, the body can be of multiple types, specified by the enctype attribute, default being x-www-form-urlencoded, which mimics a GET request. In my browser's dev tools, I checked the request in the networking panel. The fetch requests were all there, but they differed from the native requests in an important way: the body was called 'Form data' in native requests, where in fetches it appeared as 'Request payload'. The latter is obviously not going to be identified by DDG or any website as form data to parse, so I tried fetching with the correct content-type header explicitly set: fetch(window.location, { method: 'POST', headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' }, body: 'q=testddg' }) .then(result => { result.text() .then(text => { document.documentElement.innerHTML = new DOMParser() .parseFromString(text, 'text/html') .documentElement.innerHTML }) }) Boom, worked perfectly, just as we'd expect. So what was the point of this? We haven't really learned much, because handling form submissions via AJAX always requires such considerations, and that's irrelevant here anyway because the web page in question does not use AJAX, it's a plain HTML version of the site! What we have determined is that there's most probably nothing wrong with their web page and the problem is more likely to be originating from your side. I get the feeling that your browser is, for some reason, not applying the correct default enctype for the DDG/html form or uMatrix is interrupting the request and re-sending the request as a generic POST without the explicit content-type. I've been unable to reproduce the bug on my machine. Do you use any other browser extensions? Does the site work in other browsers you may have?
• WhitneyLand 10y ago
  DDG is a great success story, I wish the whole team the best. I wonder how an exit will play out though. A big factor with DDG is user trust - that seems to limit the list potential buyers to the few that could credibly maintain that trust. Then there is the IPO route, but that has it's own challenges. You could argue that up until now DDG has had no competition because Google doesn't think it's worth raising its hand to swat a fly. But there is no flying under the radar after an IPO. What if Google promoted a new "no track" feature which matched DDGs benefits without having to do dumb things like append query arguments, modify location, and run plugins? You might say Google would never give up this much tracking control, but there are two caveats. First, if it's just an option buried in settings there will be limited uptake yet DDG's ability to claim differentiation would be nullified. Secondly, as DDG itself says, search can still be a great business without having to track people. If I were lucky enough to be in DDGs position I would push for a Microsoft acquisition. MS has kept enough promises in recent years that they just may be able provide DDG users enough guarantees to maintain the trust. People have mentioned Apple but that seems like a lower probability for a variety of reasons. An MS deal would avoid the massive hassle of an IPO and enough resources to chip away at Google indefinitely without being pressured into short term decisions. For now I'm just glad DDG is here trying to do some good.
  • boomboomsubban 10y ago
    What promises has Microsoft kept that would make me consider trusting privacy to them? A sale to Microsoft would mean the decision to use duckduckgo would rely solely on search performance, and as much as I love bangs it's not a better search engine.
    • WhitneyLand 10y ago
      No big company is perfect, so trust is a relative judgement. It's also somewhat based on values, so we may think have different opinions. For example, I would trust MS more than Oracle, or one of the big cable companies.
      • boomboomsubban 10y ago
• WereBooks 10y ago
  We love DDG, and use them for search on our site because privacy and DNT are so important to us.
• severine 10y ago
  I use DDG Lite with Dillo, a fast non-Javascript GUI browser, but lately (I'd say since the first week of January, according to this message [1] in Dillo's mailing list), I'm unable to visit the search results using Dillo's native search box. Instead of sending me to example.com, DDG redirects to a weird constructed address [2]). If I go to duckduckgo.com/lite and search there, it works fine. Any ideas? What would be the best (eh, sorry) place to post this? Of course, thanks for your great work, and bangs are amazing! [1] http://lists.dillo.org/pipermail/dillo-dev/2017-January/011043.html http://lists.dillo.org/pipermail/dillo-dev/2017-January/0110... [2] https://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2F https://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.co...
  • g_lined 10y ago
    This is to stop your HTTP referrer leaking your search terms: "DuckDuckGo prevents search leakage by default. Instead, when you click on a link on our site, we route (redirect) that request in such a way so that it does not send your search terms to other sites. The other sites will still know that you visited them, but they will not know what search you entered beforehand." https://duckduckgo.com/privacy https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
• justacat 10y ago
  Pretty much the only time I switch away from your search engine is when I want to extend the time constraint to "Past Year", if you fix that you should increase your total searches this next year by at least 200... http://i.imgur.com/0O15hJV.png http://i.imgur.com/0O15hJV.png