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Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
- justfor1comment 8y agoUsing it as my default on my personal gadgets. Practically the same as Google for generic searches.
- clubm8 8y agoIf it doesn't work the !s bang command can search with Startpage (proxied Google search)
- edraferi 8y agoEven !g does some masking for you, although you still wind up on google.com
- gutnor 8y agoI haven't been so lucky, maybe that's because of searches in the UK ? Google manages to find more locally relevant information (the most annoying one is the stuff from amazon.com instead of amazon.co.uk). You can easily turn "UK search" in DDG, but when you do it, but in turn that's less relevant for technical search. Probably will wait a few more months to give it another go.
- justfor1comment 8y agoYes, it's not good for the use case you described. That's what I intended to say with my comment on "generic searches". If you are looking for something very specific like a piece of code that resolves your OOM error or a uk seller of a xkcd hoodie then it's better to add !g to your search.
- seibelj 8y agoThe average tech person has been switching away from Google products, and this filters down to their social networks, and then their networks, and so on. It's a big deal when the tech people decide to switch. For me, it was Chrome making me log-in to my account. Now I use Firefox, DDG, ublock, privacy badger, etc. I think society writ large will begin to take privacy more seriously in the coming years. Edit FYI: If you want google results, add '!g' to the end of a DDG query and it will route to google. I use it sometimes, but not that often given that DDG is usually good.
- ColanR 8y agoThere's all kinds of awesome 'bangs'. I realized it's actually easier to use the variety of google/bing search engines from ddg. google scholar: !gsc google images: !gi bing: !b
- lliamander 8y agoMy favorites: etymology dictionary: !etym encyclopedia of integer sequences: !oeis
- therein 8y agoThere is even !hn
- was_boring 8y agomdn: !mdn wikipedia: !wiki django: !django python: !py All sorts of them for your average developer.
- kardos 8y agoSo is privacy at last becoming mainstream? I look forward to the end of people saying "nobody cares about privacy".
- pokemongoaway 8y agoThe concept or actual privacy? The concept will inevitably become more well-known if the actuality is becoming so obviously not private (which it is).
- ravenstine 8y agoThat saying does seem to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, so I look forward in the same way. I predict that a large swath of the population still won't care much about privacy, or at least take action to protect theirs, but I'm seeing an awakening of people coming to realize how dangerous big tech can become. What's funny to me is if Google wasn't so brazen in ditching their old "don't be evil" pretense, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion as often as we are.
- swlkr 8y agoYeah I think this is the key, privacy online is very abstract. But the sentiment of a large, evil corporation out to get you is somehow less abstract.
- relyio 8y agoSome of my friends, who aren't in tech nor are privacy-inclined, were shocked to receive an alert that data on them had been exposed in a data breach. The data had been collected by a third-party without their consent! Not long after, the dataset became available and now it is one of the top result when you type their names in Google. While the data isn't embarrassing, it includes some personal stuff they wanted to keep private. That they had not even consented into giving that data made them feel violated. And truth is, that happens everyday. Which made me think that privacy is truly a consent issue at heart. Now for a "fun" exercise, imagine how many CRMs out there run on insecure machines and what are the odds that there's someone incompetent enough to leave these databases publicly exposed and not password protected. IMO, it's extremely likely. Well, they have very strong opinions on privacy now. I guess that's the only way people will care, sadly.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ma2rten 8y agoThis metric is meaningless, for all we know DDG could have become less helpful and people have to rephrase their queries more often than before. EDIT: I'm not saying that is the case, but I hope that this example illustrates why this metrics is not a good substitute for standard metrics like DAU, MAU, revenue.
- clubm8 8y ago>EDIT: I'm not saying that is the case, but I hope that this example illustrates why this metrics is not a good substitute for standard metrics like DAU, MAU, revenue. You made a comment stating "This metric is meaningless". You are not being downvoted because we misunderstood - you're being downvoted because you are wrong.
- ndnxhs 8y agoIf the results were less helpful than people would stop using it
- kgwxd 8y agoIt's very helpful: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=then+vs+than&t=canonical&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=then+vs+than&t=canonical&ia=web
- brentadamson 8y agoI can vouch for that. We recently made a big improvement to our search results at Jive Search and have seen better traffic. People will set it as their default more if it's better.
- regnerba 8y agoDoes anyone know of a recent-ish description of the DDG infrastructure? Only posts I can find are 5 or 6 years old.
- towndrunk 8y agoI would be interested in this as well.
- kmlx 8y agois it possible to get personalized search results when using duck duck go?
- gregorygoc 8y agoThe whole point of DDG is that they don’t personalize results.
- kmlx 8y agoI would love to try out a search engine that would be able to offer personalised results while still being relatively private. Otherwise the feeling I get from DDG is a step back both in user experience, and from a general tech point of view.
- cpeterso 8y agoYou can set a default region, but nothing more personal that affects search results. https://duckduckgo.com/settings https://duckduckgo.com/settings
- mabbo 8y agoI installed a DDG Chrome extension and said I'd try it for a week. That was a month ago. Haven't found a need to switch to Google yet.
- sambull 8y agoSame here, and I had done this same experiment last year and switched back quickly. DDG is better than google often, I find relevant things quickly. For most of my searches it takes the cake, Google has a heads up on relevant recent (last hour) sort of info at the moment
- evilturnip 8y agoThe main reason I use DuckDuckGo is when I want to search for more controversial topics that Google decides to filter how they want. When I search on DuckDuckGo I know I'm not having that filter imposed on me.
- forapurpose 8y agoWhat kinds of searches are you referring to? I would guess DDG has the same legal requirements as Google. And do they not also filter violent hate groups and similar things?
- fenwick67 8y agomany examples but non-illegal sites like antipolygraph.org
- ricardonunez 8y agoI switched earlier this year. It takes some time to get used to it. I used to !g often. It doesn't feel as intuitive at knowing what you are looking like Google. Addresses and map integration is not that good either and does not come even close to Google. It is a good enough. I have their app on my phone as my search tool, which I miss Google maps more often.
- copperx 8y agoI've found that Google is better when you're doing research and your net is wide (e.g., rectal cancer incidence in Hispanics). Searching for specific and/or popular things works great on DuckDuckGo.
- ricardonunez 8y agoDefinitely. When you search for technical stuff or specific things that you are not sure what you are looking, Google results is better. but as a day to day quick searches DDG does a good job. I hope as they increase revenue they get better.
- dc_gregory 8y ago!gm <address> will push you back to google maps if you need it!
- unknown2374 8y agojust !m works actually (same with !i for google images and !n for google news)
- almostgce 8y ago!maps also works for google maps, !osm will use OpenStreetMap instead.
- forapurpose 8y agoTry using "!s", which sends you to Startpage, a search engine with Google search results but which promises privacy. (I don't know much more about Startpage, and in many discussions about DDG I ask if anyone knows more, but no luck so far.)
- Tomminn 8y agoI had no idea how good ddg had gotten these days. Being from NZ, I thought I'd give it a good challenge. I entered !maori love, thinking it was impossible it would have a bang pattern for that, and it automatically brought me here https://maoridictionary.co.nz/search?idiom=&phrase=&proverb=&loan=&histLoanWords=&keywords=love https://maoridictionary.co.nz/search?idiom=&phrase=&proverb=....
- brentadamson 8y agoThe !bangs aren't too hard to implement. It's basically just a very large config file. You can see that in our code: https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch. I run the project, btw. And, yes, we have that same !bang as well as all of DDG's !bangs.
- Theodores 8y agoThis is still very slow growth, 30M is still less than 1% of the amount of searches Google gets in a day. If you add in the searches you don't see, i.e. those little titbits of travel and other information Google decides to search for you without you even asking, then the DDG search volume is really small. Has anyone here tried 'Ecosia', the save-the-planet search engine that gives you 'Bing!' results? They don't exactly advertise where their search results come from. I wonder how their share of the search engine pie compares to DDG given that 'Ecosia' do advertise whereas DDG don't.
- stevenjohns 8y agoAfter everything that has happened in the last few weeks I've completely moved away from Google. 1. I retired my ~15 year old Gmail account and registered with Fastmail 2. I moved away from Chrome to Firefox on both my laptop and phone 3. I stopped using Chrome's password manager on iOS in favor of 1Password and Firefox Lockbox 4. I've mostly stopped using the Google search engine and now using DDG and Bing if I have to. Part of what helped me transition away from Google to DDG was skinning DDG to look like Google[0]. The first few days were really tough and I kept finding myself going back to Google about 80% of the time. I thought that the search results were remarkably poorer. I considered that it might just be anxiety of not using Google affecting my view, so as an experiment I decided to theme DDG to look like Google... and it worked. I stopped going back to Google and suddenly the searches became better. I still use the !g bang for about 20% of my searches, and there are things that Google does so much better that I use quite often (for example searching a store name and it brings up all the local ones with information on what time they close etc, or if you were to write "tengo dolor de estomago en ingles" it would bring up an interactive translation box and so on) but for general searches I've more or less completely moved away. [0] https://userstyles.org/styles/153678/duckduckgooglymoogly https://userstyles.org/styles/153678/duckduckgooglymoogly
- __blockcipher__ 8y agoNit: “tengo dolor el estomago” does not read like valid spanish to me (pero no soy hablante nativo)
- stevenjohns 8y agoEdited the "el" to "de" :)
- mygo 8y agoI switched away from Google to Bing on my iPhone because I like to Google in incognito mode for basically everything... and recently Google’s added some annoying friction to that. I started Googling in incognito when Google decided to return “personalized” search results instead of standard results, a few years ago. I was always more interested in the normal results than whatever Google thought I specifically wanted to see. But, since this Summer when I switch to a fresh incognito mode session to do a Google search, I have to click on traffic lights and sidewalks multiple times just to see the first search result. And it always says I failed the first two tries even when I know I did it right. I end up having to do a minute of clicking on images just to do a search. It’s like I’m being punished for wanting to Google in incognito. It happened often enough on my phone for me to go screw this and switch the default search engine. Bing’s search results just aren’t as good though. I often have to Google for some things, still. But now I’m trying Duck Duck Go. By the way not sure why my own anecdotal experience is being downvoted. This is my own actual experience, not really an opinion piece.
- bordercases 8y agoCan anyone comment on the security of StartPage/IxQuick? As far as I know, they proxy Google results and avoid storing them in the browser via either a URL rewrite or a POST call. I find Google to return superior search data than DDG, particularly if it's not giving you recommended or personally ranked results (that alone makes it feel worthwhile to switch to SP/IxQuick). But it kind of feels like a free lunch.
- brentadamson 8y agoBeyond what you pointed out, it's hard to really know what's going on with something closed source. Disclosure: I run jivesearch.com (basically, an open source version of DDG). FYI, we've got an open issue on GitHub to add POST requests in addition to a proxy.
- Jedi72 8y agoGoogle isnt even a good search engine any more. I tried finding my friends website, www.catbartlett.com.au, with the terms "Freelance graphic designer Cat Bartlett Perth Western Australia" - pretty specific, but the first page is nothing but LinkedIn profile links and random mentions of her in testimonials. If it takes thousands of $$ in SEO to get found, how is that a useful search engine? We might as well go back to human-submitted catalogues. I think the Google vision is to become internet gatekeepers, not to be a useful tool for finding things. That's why they need to die.
- danso 8y agoI have to doubt that this is a problem with Google. Either your friend's website was just launched (and not yet indexed), or your friend's site seems to have unusually bad SEO and configuration. Doing a Google search just for the URL brings up no results for the actual site -- though it does bring up all of your friend's social media sites: https://www.google.com/search?q="www.catbartlett.com.au" https://www.google.com/search?q="www.catbartlett.com.au" I don't think the problem is with Google. I think the problem is how the site is set up. I hope this is not something particular to Wix sites: http://www.catbartlett.com.au/robots.txt http://www.catbartlett.com.au/robots.txt
- craftyguy 8y agoI agree. Searching those exact terms on DDG does not yield the desired site on the first 3 pages (I gave up searching after that).
- tmerr 8y agoThis is most likely a WiX configuration issue. The HTML source for https://www.catbartlett.com.au/ https://www.catbartlett.com.au/ contains <meta name="robots" content="noindex"/> Maybe try https://support.wix.com/en/article/enabling-search-engines-eg-google-to-find-your-site https://support.wix.com/en/article/enabling-search-engines-e... ?
- dmix 8y agoThe website also gets a 0/100 pagescore [1] because of "noindex". Plus the <title> tag has a single word "design"...nothing about the contents of the site. It only's mention of "Cat Bartlett Graphic Design" 1x and is in an <h5> tag halfway down the page (not repeat anywhere nor in an H1 tag. No wonder google can't find it. This is SEO 101 that Google will tell you how to fix for free. [1] https://sitechecker.pro/seo-report/https://www.catbartlett.com.au/ https://sitechecker.pro/seo-report/https://www.catbartlett.c...
- eezurr 8y agoThis is great, and congrats! I have also moved away from a google eyes. Just for comparison though, Google is serving about 3.5 billion searches a day.
- joering2 8y agoHonest questions: 1) isn't it somewhat unlawful these days not to log anything on the people that are using your website? I'm all in favor of DDG, but can't they be liable if it would ever come up someone build and detonated bomb thanks to finding info via their search engine? 2) How do we know they haven't been served with NSL ? With NSA capable of breaking SSL, how do we know using DDG != using Google ?
- shopkins 8y ago1. No, services in the US like DDG largely aren't liable for what users post (or do) on their sites, mostly because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 [0]. 2. We don't know they haven't been served with a national security letter. DDG's protection scope doesn't cover you needing protection from the government, though. So we know using DDG != Google because that's the surveillance threat vector they're concerned with: literally not being Google (which they aren't). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act#Section_230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act#Sec...
- snazz 8y ago1: I'm certainly no expert on anything remotely law-related, but Google would be in a lot of trouble constantly if they were liable for the real life actions of their users, especially since Google doesn't host the information, they only link to it. The same would apply to DuckDuckGo. 2: Of course nation-state level attacks are going to be an issue for a very limited number of users. Regardless, the privacy benefits from using DDG are still significant, even if it's not a silver bullet.
- dna_polymerase 8y agoA search engine that has nothing more to offer than "privacy" isn't really worth my time. Whenever I use DDG I get inferior search results. If privacy is your concern with Google use Startpage. That Bing/Yahoo mashup that DDG want to sell simply doesn't cut it for me (or any of my friends/colleagues).
- dcow 8y agoYou are not concerned with privacy, obviously. What’s your name, address, favorite food, latest medical issue?
- dna_polymerase 8y agoThat's not at all what I wrote.
- aclsid 8y agoBut I believe you fail to see that this is just like watching somebody throw trash at a neighbor lawn and then go on thinking, well they did not do it in my lawn. At this point, everybody knows that the data mining operations run by Google and Facebook are detrimental to society as a whole for a lot of reasons, but more importantly because they represent a big brother operation without having elected officials. What is going on with Android nowadays is beyond comprehension in the privacy aspect. Unless you go really technical, it is incredible the amount of apps that will fetch your contact list, location, phone number, etc. The fact that the apps do not work if you do not consent to some of that stuff brings into question some of these business models.
- glenrivard 8y agoGoogle market share increased last month and now over 92% for all platforms. With Bing declining. DDG is showing up for the first time. But Google increasing and Bing decreasing would suggest that DDG is coming from Bing? http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share Google - 92.3% Bing - 2.28% DDG - .33% BTW, Google increase the last month is more than the total for DDG. Actually about 4x more.
- arenaninja 8y agoThe only place I still use google on is my phone because I haven't care enough to change the default browser. Even on desktop when I don't find what I want from DuckDuckGo I find myself using !b (bing) instead of !g (google) On mobile it's another story. The intrusive ads from content creators (think auto playing video, full screen popup, etc.) ruin the experience and it's easier to just look at the google-provided snippets and stop visiting these sites altogether
- ObsoleteNerd 8y agoI think a mobile browser that basically puts everything in a Reader-mode style format all the time, would be truly awesome. The web is an absolute mess. I don't even like browsing stuff anymore because I know i'm going to be overwhelmed by horrible heavy designs, endless external scripts, autoplay video on every news site, and more ads than content. I use adblockers, no-script (on desktop), etc, but there's definitely a market for browsers that take this on and give us a cleaner experience akin to the old-web.
- graeme 8y agoAt a 50% growth rate, it would take DDG 12 years to surpass Google's 2015 volume of 3 billion searches, correct? Not that DDG has to catch up to google to be a success. But it's interesting to consider the scale.
- craftyguy 8y agoThe cynical side of me wonders how long DDG will continue before they sell out. You can only live so long off of angel investors and random grants. Some organizations have been able to survive (wikipedia) this way, but it's definitely not easy.
- Cyclone_ 8y agoI believe they have revenue through ads. Don't know if they're profitable or not, my guess would be no.
- benjaminjackman 8y agoAm I the only one that finds that the DDG’s bang commands actually make DuckDuckGo more useable than google, even for googles own products? E.g. it’s faster to type in a location and append !gm after (which will cause DuckDuckGo to redirect immediately to searching within google maps itself) than it is to click around on google to bring the maps up? (Likewise for google express !ge google images !gi and especially YouTube !yt) My only wish would be some way to customize them and add new ones as they almost make web browsing into using a command line (and what that would be like with aliases and adding scripts to PATH).
- jvolkman 8y agoI just use Chrome's address bar. "map<TAB>" enters a maps-only search. Same for "you<TAB>" for youtube, etc.
- dmix 8y agoOn mobile that's not possible though. !gi for image search is one I use often on mobile. But otherwise that's very true, I also use desktop Chrome's search engines as a keyword system (typing "ny" to launch https://nytimes.com https://nytimes.com), regardless if the URL actually includes a search query.
- nyolfen 8y agoffx also has this feature, you can right click in a search field and 'add keyword'. i distinctly remember thinking 'this would be a really cool feature' maybe 10 years ago and discovering that it was already there.
- aembleton 8y agoI use ddg but don't use bangs. Instead I have 'map' and 'wiki' set up as keyword searches in Firefox. Then all I have to type is 'map London' to search Google Maps for London. Just right click in a search box and you will see an 'Add a keyword for this search' option.
- eljimmy 8y agoI'm curious to know if DuckDuckGo promotes itself using privacy-invasive platforms. How much do they truly value privacy if they're willing to let others invade for them? Reason I ask is because strangely enough, after reading this article, I hopped on Reddit and saw a promoted ad for DuckDuckGo. That can't have been a coincidence...
- dmix 8y agoA big part of this is probably Brave. I wasn't using DDG on mobile until I replaced Chrome with Brave (and I love Brave).
- Cyclone_ 8y agoOne thing I was surprised about DDG was that most of their code is written in Perl. Curious how well this will actually scale.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoAdd reverse image search and I'm there.
- nyolfen 8y agoi really want to switch to ddg, but despite seeing many comments to the contrary, the results for a lot of searches i do have noticeably inferior results. i know i shouldn't expect the world and i'll likely gradually switch, but google can be exceptionally useful for eg open-ended questions phrased in natural language.
- dang 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100243