21 ms·

Google has added DuckDuckGo as a search engine option for Chrome users

932 points by jmsflknr 8y ago

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
As noted in the article, apparently Google is presenting the top four search engines used in a given country. So presumably this means they're seeing a lot more DuckDuckGo searches in the data they're collecting from Chrome users. It's also a solid choice for them to hedge against antitrust claims, if they can point to having just added them to their browser, regardless of the fact that Google is the default and they do not present a choice screen like Microsoft had to in the EU.
- ratling 8y ago
  Antitrust was the first thing I thought of when I saw this. Doing it automatically based of statistics would work toward that end as well.
  - berbec 8y ago
    What do you bet they went looking for a automated way to avoid anti-trust and it wasn't a happy coincidence?
    - ariwilson 8y ago
      An automated way to avoid a political (human) outcome is the definition of insanity.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- crossman 8y ago
  > So presumably this means they're seeing a lot more DuckDuckGo searches in the data they're collecting from Chrome users There's a lot to unpack in that statement... Is there any recent analysis on the usage stats that chrome is reporting back that someone could point to?
  - zwkrt 8y ago
    It need not be chrome users, Google could (ironically) get relatively good metrics just by how many times ddg has been googled.
    - skoskie 8y ago
      Or from the Google router. Or their DNS service. Or ....
    - zuron7 8y ago
      Or from how many times, people have shebanged their way to google from duckduckgo.
      - mcdevilkiller 8y ago
        Shebanged or banged?
        thisacctforreal 8y ago
        Banged, shebang is #!
  - politician 8y ago
    They might obtain these statistics by mining the browser history associated with Google Accounts synced to the cloud.
    - reitanqild 8y ago
      No clue at all why politician was downvoted for this. Isn't it well known that Google scoops up web history from the browser or have they stopped doing/never done this? In the latter case any pointers would be appreciated.
      - thegeomaster 8y ago
        Google has that data only when Chrome Sync is enabled, and only when you haven't set a Sync custom passphrase (which encrypts it end-to-end).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- stcredzero 8y ago
  As noted in the article, apparently Google is presenting the top four search engines used in a given country Good. 4 is a good number. It's on the low end of the number range people think of as "enough choice."
  - class4behavior 8y ago
    4 is the new 3
    - all2 8y ago
      4 has been the 3 of China for 4000 years.
      - TremendousJudge 8y ago
        care to explain?
        all2 8y ago
        Uhh, I'll do my best. At its simplest, in the West we have a thing for threes. Three bits of God, three little pigs, three branches of government (in the USA at least), "things come in threes", three books/movies in a series (a trilogy), stories that have a "beginning/middle/end". Bottom line, the West tends toward organizing and thinking of things in threes. Some might even be superstitious about threes (perhaps a Pythagorean influence). In China the number 4 plays a similar role. I don't know much about 'numerology' in China, save to say that recently the number 4 (which apparently sounds like 'death' in Chinese) has been considered bad luck. Here's a better explanation than I could give: https://www.quora.com/In-Chinese-culture-why-is-the-number-4-considered-unlucky/answer/June-Yu-10 https://www.quora.com/In-Chinese-culture-why-is-the-number-4...
        amelius 8y ago
        Reminds me of the song "Three is a magic number".
- fader111 8y ago
  rebos.
- 3xblah 8y ago
  "... in the data they're collecting from Chrome users." What percentage of Chrome users consented to the data collection? (Is consent even required?) Does the data represent all Chrome users or only those who have consented?
  - hawski 8y ago
    I assume it's at best opt-out so 90-98% would be my guess. Although I'm talking out of my ass.
  - taneq 8y ago
    All of them, it's on page 1312 of the EULA. Didn't you read it?
    - londons_explore 8y ago
      Take a look at Google's user-directed legal jargon. They have slimmed it down to only a few pages and now have very simplified statements. Obviously every statement is now very carefully worded...
  - _phaq 8y ago
    Actually consented, as in understood the implications and freely decided that Google should have this data, probably none. That would take a lot of generosity, especially to pay that team of lawyers and technical experts, so that you have any chance of actually understanding the implications. Unwillingly consented, that's the vast majority of Chrome Sync users. Unless you enable the end-to-end-encryption (for which they require a second passphrase, so probably less than 0.1% actually use that), they will use your data for ad profiling etc.. Yes, that is on page 1312 of the Chrome Sync privacy statement. (They're only required to write it into there, if they do it, so it is quite certain that they didn't just want the bad PR for nothing.) Is consent required? Assuming they actually do collect this data from their Chrome Sync data or through similar personally identifiable ways, consent would be required in many jurisdictions, especially the EU. However, if they cared enough, it would be possible for them to collect this particular data point without personal identification. You could for example create a UUID per installation that's only associated with this one data point. Or you could have a time-based solution where each Chrome instance goes out to "vote" for their default search engine e.g. every 4 weeks. If you then look at the statistics on a weekly basis, you can just take these values times 4 to even roughly correct numbers. It's certainly going to be representative enough, you don't need every browser instance to have their vote in every week's statistic.
- dddddaviddddd 8y ago
  > So presumably this means they're seeing a lot more DuckDuckGo searches in the data they're collecting from Chrome users Reminds me of the sort of advantage Facebook had from its VPN app to identify competitors early to kill/acquire them.
- pkasting 8y ago
  Regarding "data they're collecting": The list here is based on popularity of search engines in different locales, determined using publicly available data.
0003 8y ago
1 week since Elizabeth Warren published this: https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da324c https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  The change was committed in December, according to the article and the PR: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/98b2af784450beb20cdb26cbee60168891cec4ec#diff-3168db83d84c9efc4ee8e323bd0bf798 https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/98b2af784450beb2...
  - aboutruby 8y ago
    Thanks, much more readable than googlesource.com and others. Also quite interesting that they changed the default search engine for China to be Baidu.
    - thekyle 8y ago
      > Also quite interesting that they changed the default search engine for China to be Baidu. It seems to be a logical move since I believe Google is blocked in China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China
bluetidepro 8y ago
This is new? I could have sworn I saw it in there as an option like 5+ years ago? Or was it taken out, and now they are re-adding it?
- MagicPropmaker 8y ago
  They've been using the top 4 search engines in any given country for some number of months. Sometimes it's duckduckgo
- samfisher83 8y ago
  You could always add whatever search engine you wanted in the settings. Maybe it wasn't one that was already setup as one of the drop down menus.
gesman 8y ago
Market study for potential business dev. move
gist 8y ago
For those that don't know 'quietly' is newspeak for something that happened that no press release was issued. [1] [1] Because in the world of the press everything should be announced so they can broadcast it and sell advertising by running stories. And not have to find it out by other more laborious methods.
- TallGuyShort 8y ago
  It is also often followed with a statement that the real authority on the issue didn't even bother responding with any comments, when in all likelihood the journalists also didn't try very hard to reach anyone. As it is in this case.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  For those that don't know 'quietly' is newspeak for something that happened that no press release was issued. This is a deliberate Orwell reference? Vernor Vinge speculated in Rainbows End that everything which couldn't be searched for in a search engine would effectively become invisible. In 2019, that manifests as, "everything which can't be searched for in a search engine, which is backed up by crosslinked mainstream news sites and which isn't warded by words meant to scare casual readers away."
bootlooped 8y ago
Not on Chrome mobile though, where you still cannot add search engines manually.
- katsura 8y ago
  On iOS I just updated and I was able to set ddg.
- craigc 8y ago
  I have been using Duck Duck Go on Chrome Mobile since the end of January. Do a search on the site first then it will show up in the list.
ppeetteerr 8y ago
Probably so that they may track which searches people are performing on DuckDuckGo
- marpstar 8y ago
  sad but true. I'd be interested to know if this data (i.e. non-Google search engine queries) is sent to Google. I'm assuming it is.
  - snaky 8y ago
    Is there a Chrome extension that shows to the user what information exactly Chrome is sending home?
    - misterman0 8y ago
      Imagine that the only thing that is reported to the Chrome backend is a client ID and a URL, which would be the only thing needed to render this app: https://myactivity.google.com https://myactivity.google.com Would you think of Google as trustworthy because they only gave their backend two pieces of data? I myself would not, because I'm pretty sure the actual request and response messages are looked up by client ID (in their Google Analytics data store).
    - auslander 8y ago
      Give Google some privacy of what is being sent home :) Chrome (and Chromium) creates at start and maintains SSL connections to Google. It is not easy to sniff what is being sent. Even if you MITM it, like in enterprise transparent proxies, Chrome will throw an error because of cert pinning. google domains should be whitelisted: "we recommend that you avoid the use of transparent proxies." https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/3504942?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/3504942?hl=en
      - snaky 8y ago
        Seems like patching that out of binary would be trivial task. But I doubt the Chrome extension that would do that patching could stay at Chrome store.
chvid 8y ago
Is the interface between browser and search engine not explicitly defined? Why can't I add an arbitrary web application as a search engine for chrome? (I know ... for business reasons ... but isn't Chrome open source? How is this in practice prevented?)
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  You can. In fact, Chrome automatically creates search engines for any site you search on. I can search Amazon by typing "Am<tab><query><enter>" in the address bar for example, and Chrome learned how to do that automatically despite not having any knowledge of how Amazon's search system works when I first installed it. I guess the only difference is that with this change, DDG is available as a search engine by default with a blank install, even before you've actually used it.
  - rlglwx 8y ago
    Chrome uses open search for the amazon search. It's not some chrome magic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch
    - mynameisvlad 8y ago
      Well, the automatically picking it up thing arguably is some Chrome magic.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- thekyle 8y ago
  You can add an arbitrary web application as a search engine for Chrome, just like in any other modern web browser. You go to Settings > Manage search engines > Add or pick one of the auto discovered ones. This also works in the mobile versions of Chrome. You can find more instructions here: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426 https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426
ghinshell 8y ago
Not sure if this is good or bad for DuckDuckGo, as others have pointed out, this can be used to track DuckDuckGo usage. Interesting though :D
- Zhyl 8y ago
  I would expect to see a small bump in the stats [1] which given this is DDG's main source of revenue is absolutely a good thing. "Duckduckgo is one of our main rivals." Is a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy for Google. They need to amp up DDG's legitimacy to ward off accusations of antitrust. Credibility, legitimacy and awareness are really the only things DDG needs to reach a wider audience and gain greater adoption. [1] https:/duckduckgo.com/traffic
40acres 8y ago
Is this the first of a wave of anti-anti-trust moves by big tech? It's a play that I certainly would advise. It makes sense to trade marginal revenue with low hanging fruit gestures like these to take the air out of folks like Warren and the European Competition Committee.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  No, it is just an update to what they've been doing for years: showing the top 4 search engines per market as options. Nothing new to see here.
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    But it involves DuckDuckGo!
srkmno 8y ago
On a side note: the author of this post is an EU focused reporter who echoes every anti google sentimente coming from there -> she is linking to the twitter of the guy who runs the PR for the media lobbying cartel in DC that lobbies against google -> and he in turn is posting a clip of the former state AG now senator that regularly attacks/sues google. It's quite the ecosystem.
wintorez 8y ago
I started using two browsers + search engines: 1 - I use Chrome + Google for work stuff 2 - I use Firefox + DuckDuckGo for personal stuff I sync my passwords with Bitwarden.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  I have Chrome for one purpose, and one purpose only: vSphere installations that have yet to be upgraded to include the HTML5 version. Chrome is the "Flash browser". Over the last few years DuckDuckGo have become so good at handling my queries that I only occasionally use Google. That typically happens when DuckDuckGo doesn't find what I expect, but it always turns out that neither does Google.
  - treypitt 8y ago
    wow, this is totally different than my experience. i'm a privacy advocate who defaults to DDG, but I find myself forced to use Google for many technical queries because DDG rarely handles anything except obviously answered searches. side by side comparisons with Google have been devastating, so i switch back and forth depending on technical workload and privacy-interestedness
- luckman212 8y ago
  I started doing the same. Bitwarden is the best! I urge HN users who haven't checked it out to give it a try and please support the project so it lives on.
  - wintorez 8y ago
    I agree. Bitwarden is awesome and deserves our support. I'm a subscribed user, eventhough I didn't need their subscription-only features.
    - FabHK 8y ago
      Does anyone know anything about the company (8bit Solutions, LLC) or people behind it?
bwang29 8y ago
Wonder if DuckDuckGo could request Google to be removed from the option and I kinda wished Mozilla can work the DDG.
smpetrey 8y ago
Interesting
novaRom 8y ago
My impression Google helps DDG to become a popular alternative to its own search engine. Why? Just funny fact: In 2018 Google transferred ownership of the domain name Duck.com to DuckDuckGo.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  Antitrust and PR. Look, you know that Google in an act of benevolence gave them duck.com last year, that’s PR. Antitrust angle is obvious. They want to appear they aren’t the only game in town. Esp when you have people like Warren making (hollow) antitrust campaign noise.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    They want to appear they aren’t the only game in town. Microsoft did this with Apple.
sneeze-slayer 8y ago
With some of the huge anti-trust fines levied against Google by the EU, this seems to me like Google trying to support that they are not a monopoly in search.
auvi 8y ago
I am a bit curious, how the name "DuckDuckGo" was chosen? "Google" comes from Googol i.e. 10^100.
- rocgf 8y ago
  https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+name&t=h_&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+name&t=h_&ia=web
- Fishkins 8y ago
  It's an abbreviation of Duck, Duck, Goose. They don't really explain why they chose to name it after that game. https://duck.co/help/company/name https://duck.co/help/company/name
  - minwcnt5 8y ago
    Maybe it's their ranking algorithm.
    - dharmab 8y ago
      DDG is an anonymized wrapper for Bing.
- pszndr 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_duck,_goose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_duck,_goose
- nullandvoid 8y ago
  My guess would be from the child's game "duck duck goose". Maybe the creator really enjoyed that game as kid!
- isostatic 8y ago
  Wikipedia provides Weinberg explained the beginnings of the name with respect to the children's game duck, duck, goose. He said of the origin of the name: "Really it just popped in my head one day and I just liked it. It is certainly influenced/derived from duck duck goose, but other than that there is no relation, e.g., a metaphor."
Aissen 8y ago
Qwant as well it seems: > Another pro-privacy search rivals, French search engine Qwant, has also been added as a new option — though only in its home market, France.
auslander 8y ago
Nice try G. I still won't have a byte of your code on anything I use. No data for you. I wish websites stop using your fonts and analytics and captcha too.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sigacts 8y ago
Isn't DuckDuckGo just a white label of Bing?
- untog 8y ago
  No: > 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. https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
  - Kiro 8y ago
    No? Your quote basically confirms it. All organic search results are from Oath and Bing. The other 400 sources are just for fluff like widgets.
    - bad_user 8y ago
      It's worse. AFAIK Oath / Yahoo has switched to using Bing under the hood since 2009: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/technology/companies/30soft.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/technology/companies/30so...
    - amyjess 8y ago
      Huh, the last time I tried DDG back in 2014 or so, all the search results came from Yandex, which really put me off of it.
    - FabHK 8y ago
      Having said that, Bing is no replacement for DDG.
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    How does that work with their privacy stance? Do Yahoo/Bing get to keep and use that search data and it's just anonymized, or does DDG pay to keep it untracked? Kind of disheartening regardless. I assumed they had their own scrappy, independent tech stack.
ComputerGuru 8y ago
Disclaimer: @yegg, if you're reading this, I'm posting this rant with love. I am so disappointed with DDG recently, it has adopted Google's strategy of returning searches that have nothing to do with your query if not enough results were found [0], and dialed it up to 11. If "I" "don't" "put" "each" "word" "in" "quotes," the results I get have nothing to do with my search... but if I do that (apart from the inconvenience of it all) it means (presumably?) that stemming isn't done on the search terms. Maybe I'm old school, but I expect search results to match the search terms. Fuzzy matching (stemming, synonyms) is an added bonus, but silently dropping words which don't appear is decidedly not. Moreover, a search result returning "only" two results should be taken as a good thing for someone with confidence in their dataset (DDG naturally doesn't have that, because their coverage is far from 100% of the web) - it means the search terms were extremely precise and the results are highly relevant, with irrelevant results filtered out. Decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio by willfully ignoring my search terms may increase the quantity of search results but - and I don't know about you - for me I don't care about quantity and would choose relevance as the more appropriate metric to benchmark against. (All that said, I still use DDG as my main search engine even if I am turning to appending !g far more than I ever used to because I firmly prefer DDG's respect for my privacy and person over Google's treatment of the same. But I'm disgruntled and, frankly, very disappointed. Sorry, @yegg!) [0]: https://neosmart.net/blog/2016/on-the-growing-intentional-uselessness-of-google-search-results/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2016/on-the-growing-intentional-us... Edit: actually the situation is even worse. DDG doesn't seem to even always respect "quoted" terms. Here's literally the first search I did after posting this [1]. The quoted term "CFF2" doesn't even appear in the majority of the results DDG pulls in - not just not in the page summary displayed, but literally not on the result page at all. For comparison, here's the Google equivalent: [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=windows+10+%22cff2%22&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=windows+10+%22cff2%22&t=ffab&ia=we... [2]: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=windows%2010%20%22cff2%22 https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=windows%2010%20%22cff2...
- simias 8y ago
  >Moreover, a search result returning "only" two results should be taken as a good thing for someone with confidence in their dataset I completely agree with you here but in my experience it's not anything new with DDG, that's always been a problem as far as I'm concerned. As a hobby I sometimes have to reverse engineer electronic circuits, when I'm not sure what a chip does I try to search the inscriptions on the package to see if I can find a datasheet online. Sometimes you end up with very cryptic strings like "xardc10-egh" or whatever. If you input this string on Google it gives you no results: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=xardc10%2Degh https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=xardc10%2Degh If I do it on DDG I get pages of irrelevant results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=xardc10-egh&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=xardc10-egh&t=ffab&ia=web That being said DDG improved slightly, when I did searches like those a couple of years ago I'd often end up with results containing completely broken encodings, binary dumps as ascii and other obviously erroneous content that got indexed by mistake. Here the results at least appear to link towards proper pages.
novaRom 8y ago
Fun facts: * DDG in 2018 has served similar amount of search queries as Google in 2000. * DDG growth rate is accelerating * Google search growth rate is negative * Google's share of global search is shrinking DDG stats: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://duckduckgo.com/traffic Google stats: http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/
- pcnix 8y ago
  One argument to be made is that Google Search can only go downwards from here, as it is currently a clear market leader, and the remaining segments are not easy for them to break into. For example, Baidu has a stranglehold on search in China, and that's not likely to change drastically, with Google facing internal opposition to entering China.
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    Another market is Naver in Korea. Although I dont know much about how or why they remain dominant there.
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      Last I looked at them, they remained dominant because most Korean content on the web was inside Naver's walled garden.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - eh78ssxv2f 8y ago
    This is true, but Google is also adding more search surfaces (e.g., google home, assistant etc.). So, it's possible that they might attract proportionately more users using these surfaces.
    - bhl 8y ago
graycrow 8y ago
I started to use Chrome only for Google services (gmail, youtube, maps, etc) and Firefox with DDG for everything else. With this setup Goggle can send home only the data they already know.
- newscracker 8y ago
  As someone who supports Firefox, I would say that it’s important to signal Google that there are Firefox users using its services. People have been reporting about issues with some of Google’s services on Firefox. Skype from Microsoft was recently discovered as not supporting Firefox. Every signal users send to these companies matters.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    If you don't send back crash reports and statistics to a company, you shouldn't get upset when they stop supporting your usecase or won't fix bugs you encounter.
lucaspottersky 8y ago
that means DuckDuckGo is harmless to them, no real competition there. just like Apple lets Pandora on Apple Watch and not Spotify.
wicket 8y ago
I don't think this really changes anything. It's more important to Google that DuckDuckGo users don't disable Chrome's prediction service, that way they can still collect search data on them. Adding DuckDuckGo as a search engine option whilst they leave the prediction service option intact means that this is nothing more than a publicity stunt. It's actually quite deceiving for many users who do not realise they are still sending data to Google.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  I had a feeling that google was getting a sense of the search traffic no matter which 'search engine' you configured. I suspect people that actually care about privacy aren't using Chrome though.
  - fader111 8y ago
    rebos.
- _dark_matter_ 8y ago
  Hold up, are you saying that users who use DDG are still sending _all_ their searches to Google? I'm not disagreeing but I'd love to see a source for this. It seems to me that if you switch, Chrome should use the DDG autosuggest API [0]. [0] https://duck.co/help/features/autosuggest https://duck.co/help/features/autosuggest
  - pkasting 8y ago
    Correct; if you are using DDG as your default search engine, and you enable "use a prediction service", suggest queries are sent to the "suggest_url" configured for that engine. For DDG, that URL is here: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/search_engines/prepopulated_engines.json?rcl=ad3a5890054d5bba4acc3dcdb6317f2f718525db&l=103 https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/search_engin...
    - wicket 8y ago
rum3 8y ago
Most likely they have found another way to get the same data. If not, it will be interesting to see how long it takes until there is a "bug" that reverts the search engine back to Google once they've lobbied enough that they feel safe against antitrust claims.
jonnycomputer 8y ago
why does this make me nervous?
andrenotgiant 8y ago
It looks like in Jan 2019, Google Analytics finally started classifying DDG as an Organic Search engine instead of lumping it into "Referrals" category. Although the change has the awkward effect of splitting ddg reporting into the two groups based on date of traffic.
- eclat 8y ago
  This might explain some GA reports I've recently looked at.
libso 8y ago
Purely from a search quality and end user experience stand, I'd choose Google or Bing over ddg. I have given ddg a shot for over a couple of months. But I found myself using other search engines more often than not for the lack be quality results.
- hnruss 8y ago
  Can you give some specific examples of search queries in which Google had better results?
  - newscracker 8y ago
    Not the parent, but many searches on technical topics have better quality results on Google (or Startpage, which is a proxy to it). DDG also doesn’t have searching by time for longer than the last month, whereas many a times when I look for technical stuff I also tend to look for things in the last one year, which Google and Startpage provide.
    - hnruss 8y ago
      It would be great if you could provide some concrete examples. I use DDG for technical searches almost daily and never encounter this problem.
      - AlotOfReading 8y ago
        Here's one I encountered today with an obscure debugging tool. Google gives me a bunch of relevant and useful links, all in the first few results. DDG has one semi-relevant page that links the actually relevant page and the rest are useless. That single result isn't even the first link. https://www.google.com/search?q=bare+metal+arm-none-eabi+sprite https://www.google.com/search?q=bare+metal+arm-none-eabi+spr... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bare+metal+arm-none-eabi+sprite https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bare+metal+arm-none-eabi+sprite
ngngngng 8y ago
I'm on my second attempt to use DDG instead of Google. As time goes on, my percentage of searches I use google for ticks higher and higher. I'm starting to intuitively recognize when search results will be garbage with DDG. It's tough because I really want to take back my privacy, but it seems that for 50% of searches, DDG just doesn't get me anywhere near what i'm looking for. The other day I searched for the website to check a restaurant gift card balance. All of DDGs results were obvious scam webpages. I often search for ElasticSearch documentation. DDG always returns very old versions for these docs, while google returns the most recent version.
- sstangl 8y ago
  DDG has a "retry search in Google" mode if you prefix !g to your search query. I usually try in DDG first, and then in the small cases where it's not found, I just prefix "!g" and re-execute the query.
  - lysium 8y ago
    Or suffix; actually anywhere
  - ngngngng 8y ago
    I use this regularly, and still find it frustrating. It gets old fast to just keep trying a search in DDG only to find it not working and do it all over again with !g
  - move-on-by 8y ago
    Even better is the !sp bang, which is for StartPage (a google search proxy). This way you can get the Google results and still retain some privacy from Google. I also use !w (wikipedia) and !so (stackoverflow) bangs regularly. Finally, the search doesn't have to be prefix with these bangs, it just needs in to be in the search somewhere - I find it quicker to just append it to the end personally. Full list of supported bang queries: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
    - 8y ago
stunt 8y ago
No way! I'm a Firefox user. But the fact that Chrome didn't have DuckDuckGo as an option for the search engine is funny!!
gregoryexe 8y ago
embrace enhance extinguish
lawrenceyan 8y ago
DuckDuckGo is pretty much just Bing with a duck taped over it though.
- FabHK 8y ago
  Except for all that privacy and functionality and stuff that Bing doesn't have (like bangs, or cursor down + enter to directly go to search result without using your mouse, etc. etc.)
  - lawrenceyan 8y ago
    Yes, this was mentioned as referenced by the "tape" and the "duck" added on top of the actual search engine that is Bing.
fader111 8y ago
rebos.
paulcarroty 8y ago
Duckduckgo collaborate(d) with Yandex, it's a huge red flag for me.
cwkoss 8y ago
I wonder if Warrens discussion of fair platforms had anything to do with this move.
rscafi 8y ago
I'm glad to see DDG in Brazil's list :)
krm01 8y ago
Not too long ago, Google gave DuckDuckGo the domain name Duck.com. Now this. Are they preparing an acquisition?
chid 8y ago
This is great
Rafuino 8y ago
Huh, it's as if threats from policymakers can cause a change in behavior!
theBarleyMalt 8y ago
I would like if duckduckgo had an easy way to google a search just performed there. It's good, but it doesn't replace google regularly enough yet
- brentadamson 8y ago
  Something like what we do at Jive Search? Google/Bing/Amazon/YouTube are the defaults but these are customizable with the "b" param...."&b=b,yf"
- ebeip90 8y ago
  Just put “!g” at the beginning of the query (or !s for startpage, which uses the Google search engine)
  - FabHK 8y ago
    (the bang can be anywhere in the search query, fwiw)
3xblah 8y ago
Imagine if there was no "default" search engine or list of suggested search engines in the settings. I keep a running list of "alternative" search engines -- not directly Google or Bing, not Yahoo -- that work without JS or session cookies. There are thirteen in the list at the moment. Takes user a few seconds to type https://www.google.com/?q=%s https://www.google.com/?q=%s or whatever into settings. Would that produce more meaningful "choice"? Would users choose a search engine based on advertising or word-of-mouth? Looks like Qwant uses Bing for ads. No ads if Javascript is turned off. e.g. curl -A "superagent/1.0" https://lite.qwant.com/?q=example If get no results, try this first curl -A "superagent/1.0" https://lite.qwant.com/verify Can get search suggestions in JSON via Opensearch: curl https://api.qwant.com/api/suggest/?q=example
cmurf 8y ago
I'm pessimistic enough now that my first thought wasn't anti-trust, but rather whether Chrome itself tracks my DDG searches and sends to Google anyway.
anonu 8y ago
I'll be honest, DDG is my default search on chrome. But I !google half my queries... Google is still just better.
machiaweliczny 8y ago
They have omnibar anyway, aren't they collecting data from it?
- pkasting 8y ago
  In the sense you seem to be asking, no; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19381175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19381175 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19393019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19393019 .

932 points by jmsflknr 8y ago

As noted in the article, apparently Google is presenting the top four search engines used in a given country. So presumably this means they're seeing a lot more DuckDuckGo searches in the data they're collecting from Chrome users. It's also a solid choice for them to hedge against antitrust claims, if they can point to having just added them to their browser, regardless of the fact that Google is the default and they do not present a choice screen like Microsoft had to in the EU.

ratling 8y ago
Antitrust was the first thing I thought of when I saw this. Doing it automatically based of statistics would work toward that end as well.
- berbec 8y ago
  What do you bet they went looking for a automated way to avoid anti-trust and it wasn't a happy coincidence?
  - ariwilson 8y ago
    An automated way to avoid a political (human) outcome is the definition of insanity.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
crossman 8y ago
> So presumably this means they're seeing a lot more DuckDuckGo searches in the data they're collecting from Chrome users There's a lot to unpack in that statement... Is there any recent analysis on the usage stats that chrome is reporting back that someone could point to?
- zwkrt 8y ago
  It need not be chrome users, Google could (ironically) get relatively good metrics just by how many times ddg has been googled.
  - skoskie 8y ago
    Or from the Google router. Or their DNS service. Or ....
  - zuron7 8y ago
    Or from how many times, people have shebanged their way to google from duckduckgo.
    - mcdevilkiller 8y ago
      Shebanged or banged?
      - thisacctforreal 8y ago
        Banged, shebang is #!
- politician 8y ago
  They might obtain these statistics by mining the browser history associated with Google Accounts synced to the cloud.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    No clue at all why politician was downvoted for this. Isn't it well known that Google scoops up web history from the browser or have they stopped doing/never done this? In the latter case any pointers would be appreciated.
    - thegeomaster 8y ago
      Google has that data only when Chrome Sync is enabled, and only when you haven't set a Sync custom passphrase (which encrypts it end-to-end).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
stcredzero 8y ago
As noted in the article, apparently Google is presenting the top four search engines used in a given country Good. 4 is a good number. It's on the low end of the number range people think of as "enough choice."
- class4behavior 8y ago
  4 is the new 3
  - all2 8y ago
    4 has been the 3 of China for 4000 years.
    - TremendousJudge 8y ago
      care to explain?
      - all2 8y ago
        Uhh, I'll do my best. At its simplest, in the West we have a thing for threes. Three bits of God, three little pigs, three branches of government (in the USA at least), "things come in threes", three books/movies in a series (a trilogy), stories that have a "beginning/middle/end". Bottom line, the West tends toward organizing and thinking of things in threes. Some might even be superstitious about threes (perhaps a Pythagorean influence). In China the number 4 plays a similar role. I don't know much about 'numerology' in China, save to say that recently the number 4 (which apparently sounds like 'death' in Chinese) has been considered bad luck. Here's a better explanation than I could give: https://www.quora.com/In-Chinese-culture-why-is-the-number-4-considered-unlucky/answer/June-Yu-10 https://www.quora.com/In-Chinese-culture-why-is-the-number-4...
        amelius 8y ago
        Reminds me of the song "Three is a magic number".
fader111 8y ago
rebos.
3xblah 8y ago
"... in the data they're collecting from Chrome users." What percentage of Chrome users consented to the data collection? (Is consent even required?) Does the data represent all Chrome users or only those who have consented?
- hawski 8y ago
  I assume it's at best opt-out so 90-98% would be my guess. Although I'm talking out of my ass.
- taneq 8y ago
  All of them, it's on page 1312 of the EULA. Didn't you read it?
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    Take a look at Google's user-directed legal jargon. They have slimmed it down to only a few pages and now have very simplified statements. Obviously every statement is now very carefully worded...
- _phaq 8y ago
  Actually consented, as in understood the implications and freely decided that Google should have this data, probably none. That would take a lot of generosity, especially to pay that team of lawyers and technical experts, so that you have any chance of actually understanding the implications. Unwillingly consented, that's the vast majority of Chrome Sync users. Unless you enable the end-to-end-encryption (for which they require a second passphrase, so probably less than 0.1% actually use that), they will use your data for ad profiling etc.. Yes, that is on page 1312 of the Chrome Sync privacy statement. (They're only required to write it into there, if they do it, so it is quite certain that they didn't just want the bad PR for nothing.) Is consent required? Assuming they actually do collect this data from their Chrome Sync data or through similar personally identifiable ways, consent would be required in many jurisdictions, especially the EU. However, if they cared enough, it would be possible for them to collect this particular data point without personal identification. You could for example create a UUID per installation that's only associated with this one data point. Or you could have a time-based solution where each Chrome instance goes out to "vote" for their default search engine e.g. every 4 weeks. If you then look at the statistics on a weekly basis, you can just take these values times 4 to even roughly correct numbers. It's certainly going to be representative enough, you don't need every browser instance to have their vote in every week's statistic.
dddddaviddddd 8y ago
> So presumably this means they're seeing a lot more DuckDuckGo searches in the data they're collecting from Chrome users Reminds me of the sort of advantage Facebook had from its VPN app to identify competitors early to kill/acquire them.
pkasting 8y ago
Regarding "data they're collecting": The list here is based on popularity of search engines in different locales, determined using publicly available data.

0003 8y ago

1 week since Elizabeth Warren published this: https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da324c https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
The change was committed in December, according to the article and the PR: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/98b2af784450beb20cdb26cbee60168891cec4ec#diff-3168db83d84c9efc4ee8e323bd0bf798 https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/98b2af784450beb2...
- aboutruby 8y ago
  Thanks, much more readable than googlesource.com and others. Also quite interesting that they changed the default search engine for China to be Baidu.
  - thekyle 8y ago
    > Also quite interesting that they changed the default search engine for China to be Baidu. It seems to be a logical move since I believe Google is blocked in China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China

bluetidepro 8y ago

This is new? I could have sworn I saw it in there as an option like 5+ years ago? Or was it taken out, and now they are re-adding it?

MagicPropmaker 8y ago
They've been using the top 4 search engines in any given country for some number of months. Sometimes it's duckduckgo
samfisher83 8y ago
You could always add whatever search engine you wanted in the settings. Maybe it wasn't one that was already setup as one of the drop down menus.

gesman 8y ago

Market study for potential business dev. move

gist 8y ago

For those that don't know 'quietly' is newspeak for something that happened that no press release was issued. [1] [1] Because in the world of the press everything should be announced so they can broadcast it and sell advertising by running stories. And not have to find it out by other more laborious methods.

TallGuyShort 8y ago
It is also often followed with a statement that the real authority on the issue didn't even bother responding with any comments, when in all likelihood the journalists also didn't try very hard to reach anyone. As it is in this case.
stcredzero 8y ago
For those that don't know 'quietly' is newspeak for something that happened that no press release was issued. This is a deliberate Orwell reference? Vernor Vinge speculated in Rainbows End that everything which couldn't be searched for in a search engine would effectively become invisible. In 2019, that manifests as, "everything which can't be searched for in a search engine, which is backed up by crosslinked mainstream news sites and which isn't warded by words meant to scare casual readers away."

bootlooped 8y ago

Not on Chrome mobile though, where you still cannot add search engines manually.

katsura 8y ago
On iOS I just updated and I was able to set ddg.
craigc 8y ago
I have been using Duck Duck Go on Chrome Mobile since the end of January. Do a search on the site first then it will show up in the list.

ppeetteerr 8y ago

Probably so that they may track which searches people are performing on DuckDuckGo

marpstar 8y ago
sad but true. I'd be interested to know if this data (i.e. non-Google search engine queries) is sent to Google. I'm assuming it is.
- snaky 8y ago
  Is there a Chrome extension that shows to the user what information exactly Chrome is sending home?
  - misterman0 8y ago
    Imagine that the only thing that is reported to the Chrome backend is a client ID and a URL, which would be the only thing needed to render this app: https://myactivity.google.com https://myactivity.google.com Would you think of Google as trustworthy because they only gave their backend two pieces of data? I myself would not, because I'm pretty sure the actual request and response messages are looked up by client ID (in their Google Analytics data store).
  - auslander 8y ago
    Give Google some privacy of what is being sent home :) Chrome (and Chromium) creates at start and maintains SSL connections to Google. It is not easy to sniff what is being sent. Even if you MITM it, like in enterprise transparent proxies, Chrome will throw an error because of cert pinning. google domains should be whitelisted: "we recommend that you avoid the use of transparent proxies." https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/3504942?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/3504942?hl=en
    - snaky 8y ago
      Seems like patching that out of binary would be trivial task. But I doubt the Chrome extension that would do that patching could stay at Chrome store.

chvid 8y ago

Is the interface between browser and search engine not explicitly defined? Why can't I add an arbitrary web application as a search engine for chrome? (I know ... for business reasons ... but isn't Chrome open source? How is this in practice prevented?)

Ajedi32 8y ago
You can. In fact, Chrome automatically creates search engines for any site you search on. I can search Amazon by typing "Am<tab><query><enter>" in the address bar for example, and Chrome learned how to do that automatically despite not having any knowledge of how Amazon's search system works when I first installed it. I guess the only difference is that with this change, DDG is available as a search engine by default with a blank install, even before you've actually used it.
- rlglwx 8y ago
  Chrome uses open search for the amazon search. It's not some chrome magic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch
  - mynameisvlad 8y ago
    Well, the automatically picking it up thing arguably is some Chrome magic.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
thekyle 8y ago
You can add an arbitrary web application as a search engine for Chrome, just like in any other modern web browser. You go to Settings > Manage search engines > Add or pick one of the auto discovered ones. This also works in the mobile versions of Chrome. You can find more instructions here: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426 https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426

ghinshell 8y ago

Not sure if this is good or bad for DuckDuckGo, as others have pointed out, this can be used to track DuckDuckGo usage. Interesting though :D

Zhyl 8y ago
I would expect to see a small bump in the stats [1] which given this is DDG's main source of revenue is absolutely a good thing. "Duckduckgo is one of our main rivals." Is a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy for Google. They need to amp up DDG's legitimacy to ward off accusations of antitrust. Credibility, legitimacy and awareness are really the only things DDG needs to reach a wider audience and gain greater adoption. [1] https:/duckduckgo.com/traffic

40acres 8y ago

Is this the first of a wave of anti-anti-trust moves by big tech? It's a play that I certainly would advise. It makes sense to trade marginal revenue with low hanging fruit gestures like these to take the air out of folks like Warren and the European Competition Committee.

ucaetano 8y ago
No, it is just an update to what they've been doing for years: showing the top 4 search engines per market as options. Nothing new to see here.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  But it involves DuckDuckGo!

srkmno 8y ago

On a side note: the author of this post is an EU focused reporter who echoes every anti google sentimente coming from there -> she is linking to the twitter of the guy who runs the PR for the media lobbying cartel in DC that lobbies against google -> and he in turn is posting a clip of the former state AG now senator that regularly attacks/sues google. It's quite the ecosystem.

wintorez 8y ago

I started using two browsers + search engines: 1 - I use Chrome + Google for work stuff 2 - I use Firefox + DuckDuckGo for personal stuff I sync my passwords with Bitwarden.

mrweasel 8y ago
I have Chrome for one purpose, and one purpose only: vSphere installations that have yet to be upgraded to include the HTML5 version. Chrome is the "Flash browser". Over the last few years DuckDuckGo have become so good at handling my queries that I only occasionally use Google. That typically happens when DuckDuckGo doesn't find what I expect, but it always turns out that neither does Google.
- treypitt 8y ago
  wow, this is totally different than my experience. i'm a privacy advocate who defaults to DDG, but I find myself forced to use Google for many technical queries because DDG rarely handles anything except obviously answered searches. side by side comparisons with Google have been devastating, so i switch back and forth depending on technical workload and privacy-interestedness
luckman212 8y ago
I started doing the same. Bitwarden is the best! I urge HN users who haven't checked it out to give it a try and please support the project so it lives on.
- wintorez 8y ago
  I agree. Bitwarden is awesome and deserves our support. I'm a subscribed user, eventhough I didn't need their subscription-only features.
  - FabHK 8y ago
    Does anyone know anything about the company (8bit Solutions, LLC) or people behind it?

bwang29 8y ago

Wonder if DuckDuckGo could request Google to be removed from the option and I kinda wished Mozilla can work the DDG.

smpetrey 8y ago

Interesting

novaRom 8y ago

My impression Google helps DDG to become a popular alternative to its own search engine. Why? Just funny fact: In 2018 Google transferred ownership of the domain name Duck.com to DuckDuckGo.

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
Antitrust and PR. Look, you know that Google in an act of benevolence gave them duck.com last year, that’s PR. Antitrust angle is obvious. They want to appear they aren’t the only game in town. Esp when you have people like Warren making (hollow) antitrust campaign noise.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  They want to appear they aren’t the only game in town. Microsoft did this with Apple.

sneeze-slayer 8y ago

With some of the huge anti-trust fines levied against Google by the EU, this seems to me like Google trying to support that they are not a monopoly in search.

auvi 8y ago

I am a bit curious, how the name "DuckDuckGo" was chosen? "Google" comes from Googol i.e. 10^100.

rocgf 8y ago
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+name&t=h_&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+name&t=h_&ia=web
Fishkins 8y ago
It's an abbreviation of Duck, Duck, Goose. They don't really explain why they chose to name it after that game. https://duck.co/help/company/name https://duck.co/help/company/name
- minwcnt5 8y ago
  Maybe it's their ranking algorithm.
  - dharmab 8y ago
    DDG is an anonymized wrapper for Bing.
pszndr 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_duck,_goose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_duck,_goose
nullandvoid 8y ago
My guess would be from the child's game "duck duck goose". Maybe the creator really enjoyed that game as kid!
isostatic 8y ago
Wikipedia provides Weinberg explained the beginnings of the name with respect to the children's game duck, duck, goose. He said of the origin of the name: "Really it just popped in my head one day and I just liked it. It is certainly influenced/derived from duck duck goose, but other than that there is no relation, e.g., a metaphor."

Aissen 8y ago

Qwant as well it seems: > Another pro-privacy search rivals, French search engine Qwant, has also been added as a new option — though only in its home market, France.

auslander 8y ago

Nice try G. I still won't have a byte of your code on anything I use. No data for you. I wish websites stop using your fonts and analytics and captcha too.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sigacts 8y ago

Isn't DuckDuckGo just a white label of Bing?

untog 8y ago
No: > 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. https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
- Kiro 8y ago
  No? Your quote basically confirms it. All organic search results are from Oath and Bing. The other 400 sources are just for fluff like widgets.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    It's worse. AFAIK Oath / Yahoo has switched to using Bing under the hood since 2009: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/technology/companies/30soft.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/technology/companies/30so...
  - amyjess 8y ago
    Huh, the last time I tried DDG back in 2014 or so, all the search results came from Yandex, which really put me off of it.
  - FabHK 8y ago
    Having said that, Bing is no replacement for DDG.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  How does that work with their privacy stance? Do Yahoo/Bing get to keep and use that search data and it's just anonymized, or does DDG pay to keep it untracked? Kind of disheartening regardless. I assumed they had their own scrappy, independent tech stack.

ComputerGuru 8y ago

Disclaimer: @yegg, if you're reading this, I'm posting this rant with love. I am so disappointed with DDG recently, it has adopted Google's strategy of returning searches that have nothing to do with your query if not enough results were found [0], and dialed it up to 11. If "I" "don't" "put" "each" "word" "in" "quotes," the results I get have nothing to do with my search... but if I do that (apart from the inconvenience of it all) it means (presumably?) that stemming isn't done on the search terms. Maybe I'm old school, but I expect search results to match the search terms. Fuzzy matching (stemming, synonyms) is an added bonus, but silently dropping words which don't appear is decidedly not. Moreover, a search result returning "only" two results should be taken as a good thing for someone with confidence in their dataset (DDG naturally doesn't have that, because their coverage is far from 100% of the web) - it means the search terms were extremely precise and the results are highly relevant, with irrelevant results filtered out. Decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio by willfully ignoring my search terms may increase the quantity of search results but - and I don't know about you - for me I don't care about quantity and would choose relevance as the more appropriate metric to benchmark against. (All that said, I still use DDG as my main search engine even if I am turning to appending !g far more than I ever used to because I firmly prefer DDG's respect for my privacy and person over Google's treatment of the same. But I'm disgruntled and, frankly, very disappointed. Sorry, @yegg!) [0]: https://neosmart.net/blog/2016/on-the-growing-intentional-uselessness-of-google-search-results/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2016/on-the-growing-intentional-us... Edit: actually the situation is even worse. DDG doesn't seem to even always respect "quoted" terms. Here's literally the first search I did after posting this [1]. The quoted term "CFF2" doesn't even appear in the majority of the results DDG pulls in - not just not in the page summary displayed, but literally not on the result page at all. For comparison, here's the Google equivalent: [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=windows+10+%22cff2%22&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=windows+10+%22cff2%22&t=ffab&ia=we... [2]: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=windows%2010%20%22cff2%22 https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=windows%2010%20%22cff2...

simias 8y ago
>Moreover, a search result returning "only" two results should be taken as a good thing for someone with confidence in their dataset I completely agree with you here but in my experience it's not anything new with DDG, that's always been a problem as far as I'm concerned. As a hobby I sometimes have to reverse engineer electronic circuits, when I'm not sure what a chip does I try to search the inscriptions on the package to see if I can find a datasheet online. Sometimes you end up with very cryptic strings like "xardc10-egh" or whatever. If you input this string on Google it gives you no results: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=xardc10%2Degh https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=xardc10%2Degh If I do it on DDG I get pages of irrelevant results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=xardc10-egh&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=xardc10-egh&t=ffab&ia=web That being said DDG improved slightly, when I did searches like those a couple of years ago I'd often end up with results containing completely broken encodings, binary dumps as ascii and other obviously erroneous content that got indexed by mistake. Here the results at least appear to link towards proper pages.

novaRom 8y ago

Fun facts: * DDG in 2018 has served similar amount of search queries as Google in 2000. * DDG growth rate is accelerating * Google search growth rate is negative * Google's share of global search is shrinking DDG stats: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://duckduckgo.com/traffic Google stats: http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/

pcnix 8y ago
One argument to be made is that Google Search can only go downwards from here, as it is currently a clear market leader, and the remaining segments are not easy for them to break into. For example, Baidu has a stranglehold on search in China, and that's not likely to change drastically, with Google facing internal opposition to entering China.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  Another market is Naver in Korea. Although I dont know much about how or why they remain dominant there.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    Last I looked at them, they remained dominant because most Korean content on the web was inside Naver's walled garden.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- eh78ssxv2f 8y ago
  This is true, but Google is also adding more search surfaces (e.g., google home, assistant etc.). So, it's possible that they might attract proportionately more users using these surfaces.
  - bhl 8y ago

graycrow 8y ago

I started to use Chrome only for Google services (gmail, youtube, maps, etc) and Firefox with DDG for everything else. With this setup Goggle can send home only the data they already know.

newscracker 8y ago
As someone who supports Firefox, I would say that it’s important to signal Google that there are Firefox users using its services. People have been reporting about issues with some of Google’s services on Firefox. Skype from Microsoft was recently discovered as not supporting Firefox. Every signal users send to these companies matters.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  If you don't send back crash reports and statistics to a company, you shouldn't get upset when they stop supporting your usecase or won't fix bugs you encounter.

lucaspottersky 8y ago

that means DuckDuckGo is harmless to them, no real competition there. just like Apple lets Pandora on Apple Watch and not Spotify.

wicket 8y ago

I don't think this really changes anything. It's more important to Google that DuckDuckGo users don't disable Chrome's prediction service, that way they can still collect search data on them. Adding DuckDuckGo as a search engine option whilst they leave the prediction service option intact means that this is nothing more than a publicity stunt. It's actually quite deceiving for many users who do not realise they are still sending data to Google.

linuxftw 8y ago
I had a feeling that google was getting a sense of the search traffic no matter which 'search engine' you configured. I suspect people that actually care about privacy aren't using Chrome though.
- fader111 8y ago
  rebos.
_dark_matter_ 8y ago
Hold up, are you saying that users who use DDG are still sending _all_ their searches to Google? I'm not disagreeing but I'd love to see a source for this. It seems to me that if you switch, Chrome should use the DDG autosuggest API [0]. [0] https://duck.co/help/features/autosuggest https://duck.co/help/features/autosuggest
- pkasting 8y ago
  Correct; if you are using DDG as your default search engine, and you enable "use a prediction service", suggest queries are sent to the "suggest_url" configured for that engine. For DDG, that URL is here: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/search_engines/prepopulated_engines.json?rcl=ad3a5890054d5bba4acc3dcdb6317f2f718525db&l=103 https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/search_engin...
  - wicket 8y ago

rum3 8y ago

Most likely they have found another way to get the same data. If not, it will be interesting to see how long it takes until there is a "bug" that reverts the search engine back to Google once they've lobbied enough that they feel safe against antitrust claims.

jonnycomputer 8y ago

why does this make me nervous?

andrenotgiant 8y ago

It looks like in Jan 2019, Google Analytics finally started classifying DDG as an Organic Search engine instead of lumping it into "Referrals" category. Although the change has the awkward effect of splitting ddg reporting into the two groups based on date of traffic.

eclat 8y ago
This might explain some GA reports I've recently looked at.

libso 8y ago

Purely from a search quality and end user experience stand, I'd choose Google or Bing over ddg. I have given ddg a shot for over a couple of months. But I found myself using other search engines more often than not for the lack be quality results.

hnruss 8y ago
Can you give some specific examples of search queries in which Google had better results?
- newscracker 8y ago
  Not the parent, but many searches on technical topics have better quality results on Google (or Startpage, which is a proxy to it). DDG also doesn’t have searching by time for longer than the last month, whereas many a times when I look for technical stuff I also tend to look for things in the last one year, which Google and Startpage provide.
  - hnruss 8y ago
    It would be great if you could provide some concrete examples. I use DDG for technical searches almost daily and never encounter this problem.
    - AlotOfReading 8y ago
      Here's one I encountered today with an obscure debugging tool. Google gives me a bunch of relevant and useful links, all in the first few results. DDG has one semi-relevant page that links the actually relevant page and the rest are useless. That single result isn't even the first link. https://www.google.com/search?q=bare+metal+arm-none-eabi+sprite https://www.google.com/search?q=bare+metal+arm-none-eabi+spr... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bare+metal+arm-none-eabi+sprite https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bare+metal+arm-none-eabi+sprite

ngngngng 8y ago

I'm on my second attempt to use DDG instead of Google. As time goes on, my percentage of searches I use google for ticks higher and higher. I'm starting to intuitively recognize when search results will be garbage with DDG. It's tough because I really want to take back my privacy, but it seems that for 50% of searches, DDG just doesn't get me anywhere near what i'm looking for. The other day I searched for the website to check a restaurant gift card balance. All of DDGs results were obvious scam webpages. I often search for ElasticSearch documentation. DDG always returns very old versions for these docs, while google returns the most recent version.

sstangl 8y ago
DDG has a "retry search in Google" mode if you prefix !g to your search query. I usually try in DDG first, and then in the small cases where it's not found, I just prefix "!g" and re-execute the query.
- lysium 8y ago
  Or suffix; actually anywhere
- ngngngng 8y ago
  I use this regularly, and still find it frustrating. It gets old fast to just keep trying a search in DDG only to find it not working and do it all over again with !g
- move-on-by 8y ago
  Even better is the !sp bang, which is for StartPage (a google search proxy). This way you can get the Google results and still retain some privacy from Google. I also use !w (wikipedia) and !so (stackoverflow) bangs regularly. Finally, the search doesn't have to be prefix with these bangs, it just needs in to be in the search somewhere - I find it quicker to just append it to the end personally. Full list of supported bang queries: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
  - 8y ago

stunt 8y ago

No way! I'm a Firefox user. But the fact that Chrome didn't have DuckDuckGo as an option for the search engine is funny!!

gregoryexe 8y ago

embrace enhance extinguish

lawrenceyan 8y ago

DuckDuckGo is pretty much just Bing with a duck taped over it though.

FabHK 8y ago
Except for all that privacy and functionality and stuff that Bing doesn't have (like bangs, or cursor down + enter to directly go to search result without using your mouse, etc. etc.)
- lawrenceyan 8y ago
  Yes, this was mentioned as referenced by the "tape" and the "duck" added on top of the actual search engine that is Bing.

fader111 8y ago

rebos.

paulcarroty 8y ago

Duckduckgo collaborate(d) with Yandex, it's a huge red flag for me.

cwkoss 8y ago

I wonder if Warrens discussion of fair platforms had anything to do with this move.

rscafi 8y ago

I'm glad to see DDG in Brazil's list :)

krm01 8y ago

Not too long ago, Google gave DuckDuckGo the domain name Duck.com. Now this. Are they preparing an acquisition?

chid 8y ago

This is great

Rafuino 8y ago

Huh, it's as if threats from policymakers can cause a change in behavior!

theBarleyMalt 8y ago

I would like if duckduckgo had an easy way to google a search just performed there. It's good, but it doesn't replace google regularly enough yet

brentadamson 8y ago
Something like what we do at Jive Search? Google/Bing/Amazon/YouTube are the defaults but these are customizable with the "b" param...."&b=b,yf"
ebeip90 8y ago
Just put “!g” at the beginning of the query (or !s for startpage, which uses the Google search engine)
- FabHK 8y ago
  (the bang can be anywhere in the search query, fwiw)

3xblah 8y ago

Imagine if there was no "default" search engine or list of suggested search engines in the settings. I keep a running list of "alternative" search engines -- not directly Google or Bing, not Yahoo -- that work without JS or session cookies. There are thirteen in the list at the moment. Takes user a few seconds to type https://www.google.com/?q=%s https://www.google.com/?q=%s or whatever into settings. Would that produce more meaningful "choice"? Would users choose a search engine based on advertising or word-of-mouth? Looks like Qwant uses Bing for ads. No ads if Javascript is turned off. e.g. curl -A "superagent/1.0" https://lite.qwant.com/?q=example If get no results, try this first curl -A "superagent/1.0" https://lite.qwant.com/verify Can get search suggestions in JSON via Opensearch: curl https://api.qwant.com/api/suggest/?q=example

cmurf 8y ago

I'm pessimistic enough now that my first thought wasn't anti-trust, but rather whether Chrome itself tracks my DDG searches and sends to Google anyway.

anonu 8y ago

I'll be honest, DDG is my default search on chrome. But I !google half my queries... Google is still just better.

machiaweliczny 8y ago

They have omnibar anyway, aren't they collecting data from it?

pkasting 8y ago
In the sense you seem to be asking, no; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19381175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19381175 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19393019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19393019 .