20 ms·

DuckDuckGo's traffic keeps growing

342 points by TekMol 7y ago

kilo_bravo_3 7y ago
DDG has gotten better to the point that I have switched all of my browsers to them and the number of times I have had to fall back to Google Search has dwindled to almost nothing. If you were turned off by poor results in the past give them another try.
- lostmsu 7y ago
  Even better, recently I started to notice when I have to fallback to Google, that usually brings me nothing new. Still do it out of habit, but that will have to go soon.
  - taborj 7y ago
    I thought this was just me and the esoteric technical issues I've been searching for lately. But...you're right. Even with general searches.
- 0x38B 7y ago
  I'll second this. DDG has been my default for 2+ years. Google is better for obscure topics that lack good keywords to find them by. I usually know when I need to '!g'.
  - klingonopera 7y ago
    What's great about this is that we're still telling DDG what searches we need to do on Google, so they have plenty of diagnostic data available to better their searches (as opposed to skipping DDG entirely). I do have one nitpick though: I clear all private data, and recently I was forced to get along with 16 kbit bandwidth (yes, slower than 56K, and yes, I spent a lot of time on HN for obvious reasons), and DDG definitely loads more data than Google for a query. Google needed maybe 20 seconds to load a page, DDG IIRC just timed out after some point. I'm guessing it's JS-frameworks?
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      And ddg can improve its results by slurping in Google's #1 result for every !g query, like Bing got caught doing.
    - frosted-flakes 7y ago
      DDG does have a lite HTML version of their site that is much faster. https://duckduckgo.com/lite https://duckduckgo.com/lite
- lawn 7y ago
  Absolutely. They're only really worse at localized results for me (Swedish).
- loceng 7y ago
  How often do you use !g or other bangs?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - FrancoisBosun 7y ago
    In 5 years, I used !g maybe once. I use !pg, !wen and others very frequently.
  - sp332 7y ago
    I use !g for specific types of searches. Like when I want to compare things, Google handles "vs" queries much better than DDG.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    I use alternate bangs all the time, which is a major win for DDG, as it skips the "go to the site first, or specify "site:<host> <search>", which actually is NOT equivalent as bang searches use the site or service's native search. Fave bangs: !w wikipedia !wikisource WikiSource !etym Online etymological dictionary !ngram Google Ngram viewer !trends Google Trends !gbooks Google Books !scholar Google Scholar !tineye Image match search !so stack overflow !hn Hacker News !twitter Obv. !thread Threadreader App, Twitter thread presentation, preferred to above ;-) !img Image search (now DDG, Google Image is !gimg) !worldcat Worldcat union catalog !osm Open Streetmap !wayback Internet Archive Wayback Machine !archive Internet Archive global (non-Web + web) search !dict & !define Word look-ups !s startpage (proxied Google search) !bangs will give you a list of bangs / search form for patterns.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    I use them all the time. !wt for Wiktionary, !forvo for forvo, !ji for jisho.org, !w for Wikipedia, !ud for Urban Dictionary, !clojuredocs, and a load of others.
  - fl0under 7y ago
    Ones I use frequently are !g google !maps google maps !yt youtube !mwt merriam-webster thesaurus !images ddg images Even though I only regularly use these few I find them very useful.
- Eric_WVGG 7y ago
  I use Google on my desktop and iPad, and DDG on my iPhone due to Google AMP. While I find that DDG is pretty good for anything work related (e.g. programming stuff), it’s mostly worthless for things like "best chinese food in [some neighborhood]" or "shop cord knit stockings"… ironically, exactly the kind of stuff I gravitate toward my phone for.
  - neltnerb 7y ago
    I suppose it's not surprising that DDG is weaker in areas where Google has leveraged their products from other markets to enhance their search results. Well "markets" loosely since advertisers are the actual market, but I mean discrete products. Google has Google Maps. That's why Google can find the best Chinese food in your neighborhood, it's learned to interpret that as a semi-map query right? They also have ads, which means cleaner data on who sells what right? DDG to me seems to be great for when I need to search for keywords rather than a concept or multi-dimensional query for which DDG doesn't have the other n dimensions of source data.
  - krtkush 7y ago
    For me, on iPhone Siri handles these kind of contextual questions for me while DDG takes care of other generic stuff.
- dstaley 7y ago
  I tried switching my phone and computer's default search engine to DDG a few weeks ago, and the quality of programming-related searches was just abysmal compared to Google. Straightforward searches were basically the same results, but searching for error messages or library-specific terms would have a great result in the top slot on Google but nowhere on DDG. I found that I needed to use `!g` for every other search, and figured that if it was causing this much additional effort it would make more sense to just default to Google. One idea that I've had is building an extension that monitors Google searches and compares the results you click on to DDG. You could monitor which percentage of your chosen results appear on the first page of DDG. Maybe then I could actually quantify which queries are problematic.
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    That's counter to what i have found. Are you just seeing this on local or location related searches?
    - dstaley 7y ago
      No, those are a whole separate thing that I wouldn't expect DDG to match the quality of. It's primarily been software development related queries. For example, a few days ago I searched for "react dnd expected to find a valid target" on Google, and the first result is a GitHub issue describing the issue. All the results on the first page are related to the react-dnd library. The first result for the same query on DDG is an article titled "11 Prison Truths, Revealed By A Female Guard". None of the results on the first page are programming related.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        Don't use react, and it's not in my search set, but regularly and happily search for programming and tech issues on DDG. I find it's far better than Google these days. So I thought I'd try your search without the quotes, as your first result is so far from my experience. First result: https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd/issues/1127 https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd/issues/1127 Then a couple more from react-dnd's github, then the other seven on the first page are a mix of relevant SO, and github. Seems quite a few people have opened issues on that topic! Maybe they fixed it. :)
- colordrops 7y ago
  It's not just that DDG is good enough - it seems that DDG has better results than Google for many searches. Any topic where Google engineers and their algorithms believe they know better than you will return "worse" results. I believe they are weighting results by some measure of truth-value for a particular type of information, and this is bad for a couple reasons. First, they might get the measure of truth wrong, either out of ignorance or conflict of interest. Second, you might want a more literal search where the keywords match exactly even though the info might not be very accurate, for instance if you were researching alternate theories. Examples of where Google search fails to return relevant results because they know better than you are medical, political, illicit/illegal, conspiracy theory, and famous people. Often times the first page of results don't contain the keywords and don't seem to have anything to do with your search query, whereas DDG results do.
  - Liquix 7y ago
    Thanks for explaining! It's infuriating to craft a search query containing all the keywords/operators needed to return relevant results - a search query that would return relevant results 24 months ago - only to see Google ignore 75% of keywords completely, extract some commonly-used pair of words from the query, and return 5 pages of results based exclusively on said pair. What was the motive behind this change? Was the previous algorithm really giving people results so bad that Google felt they had to hamstring their flagship product? It seemed to be getting better and better until this...
    - marcosdumay 7y ago
      This is a long going change. Google has been making their search fuzzier for years claiming it gets better results for most people. For a while I personally experienced better results on the queries I didn't know the exact name of the thing I was searching for. But those days are gone, because nowadays their search is so fuzzy that it can't extract the correct context from those queries.
    - staticassertion 7y ago
      Because you aren't supposed to Google search by entering in a bunch of keywords you're supposed to ask Google questions. Not that your workflow is incorrect, I'm a DDG user and I do the same thing, but that's what Google wants people using their product to do.
- dstroot 7y ago
  Can someone explain the DDG business model? How does this company make money? How am I as a user being monetized? At least I understand Google’s approach.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Advertising. Untargeted advertising.
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    There are some ads there. I don't think they have been very successful selling them, but it looks like search is cheaper to provide than it used to be.
  - tagawa 7y ago
    As others have said, we get revenue from contextual advertising as opposed to behavioural advertising. In other words, if you search for "car" you'd see a car-related ad rather than an ad based on your search history or personal profile (which we don't have anyway). There's more info about our business model here: https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/ https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/ Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff
- oh_hello 7y ago
  I have had the same experience. Over the years I tried DDG and gave up a few different times. A year or so ago I gave it another try and never left.
- keithnz 7y ago
  I have mixed results, sometimes DDG is pretty good, a lot of times its about the same, but reasonably regularly it leaves me high and dry on an entire page of results and then usually the top hits on google give me what I want. However, I always go DDG first, then !g if I don't get what I want.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    this is when you use !sp instead of google :)
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
I use DDG for almost everything now because it's mostly just as good as google. I think there's still some cases where Google is a little better: for example with Developer/technical searches.
AdamGibbins 7y ago
I've replaced my usage of DDG sadly, with startpage, I get superior results. Found myself way too often prefixing queries with !g especially for technical or localised (UK) stuff.
- Shank 7y ago
  From Startpage: "You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs." It sounds like you're just using Google without the branding/tracking.
  - trident1000 7y ago
    And now the question is, how is Startpage paying Google without monetizing its users?
    - taborj 7y ago
      If the product is free, you're the product. I don't know anything about Startpage, but I bet we'll find they're tracking something...
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        Startpage shows ads, just like DuckDuckGo: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/180/20/how-can-startpage-be-free-how-do-you-make-money https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...
        taborj 7y ago
        Makes sense. So I was right; you are the product. They want to get ads in front of users. Note that there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
    - defulmere 7y ago
      tl;dr they're paid to serve ads based on anonymized search terms https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/180/0/how-can-startpage-be-free-how-do-you-make-money https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...
marcoseliziario 7y ago
DDG is more neutral in political themes. You usually see some results that you wouldn't see on the first page on google. Google still has a slight advantage when searching for technical info, but most of times DDG is good enough for them too.
- benjohnson 7y ago
  I'll second this - Google is starting to hide things that it deems objectionable and I've found myself using DDG now and then for controversial topics.
  - turk73 7y ago
    As someone who worked on search engine algorithms in grad school in the late '90s when Google was coming of age and everyone admired them and thought their engineers were brilliant, it is just discouraging to witness what they have become. Technology was supposed to free mankind, not make everywhere like China or the former East Germany. Depressing.
- utopcell 7y ago
  You do know that DDG just serves Bing organic results, right ?
  - machello13 7y ago
    People keep saying this, but from what I could find on DDG's website, Bing is just one of several sources they use, one of which is their own crawler.
    - utopcell 7y ago
      No need to take my word for it, just search on both and look at the 10 blue links. Makes you think why they present Google as compromising your privacy, but they're dead-silent when it comes to Microsoft. Or Yandex, their other search partner.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mraudiobook_com 7y ago
Duck duck now beats Google hands down for general search. I have a site that is number one on ddg for my name, but does not show up until page 5 on Google with total nonsense and ads above it. Not sure what happened but I'm done googling.
jbarberu 7y ago
I made the switch to DDG from Google back around 2013/2014. Rarely do I ever need the !g to find anything, and frankly with all the inline ads on Google, I'm having a harder time navigating those results these days.
- CryptoBanker 7y ago
  Every time I see a comment like this on HN, I'm quite frankly shocked that so many tech oriented people don't use ad blockers. I use UBlock Origin, and I haven't seen an ad on Google in years at this point...
  - jbarberu 7y ago
    Turns out I don't see the inline ads on Google anymore. Not sure when that changed. I was using NoScript from 2010 until FireFox Quantum came out and broke things. Since then I've been on UBlock + UMatrix. Agreed, seeing the internet without an ad blocker is a terrifying experience indeed.
Angeo34 7y ago
I really don't get how people can trust US companies who have privacy as one of their main selling points. You are aware US/UK companies by definition cannot be private regardless what they say themselves. If you want privacy use EU companies. If you don't want to use EU companies use Google since contrary to DDG they are heavily controlled by law. If you like the bangs of DDG use a native app like Albert or Alfred which is way more accessible anyway.
- olyjohn 7y ago
  A native app? Native to what? I'm trying to search the web... from a web browser. I'd be interested to hear what EU-based search engines are out there that have privacy as one of their values. Also if Google is heavily controlled by law, then what laws don't apply to DDG that would make me safer using Google?
  - bugbug99 7y ago
    SwissCows might be slightly better per jurisdiction. DDG is blocking Tor users pretty often these days.
    - tagawa 7y ago
      That's strange. We support Tor both verbally and financially, and have an onion address for Tor users (http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/ http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/). If you have any more details on this, such as a time of day it tends to happen, frequency of searches that trigger it, or browser/OS, I'd be grateful if you could let me know or feel free to email open [at] duckduckgo.com Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff
- berkes 7y ago
  I might have the wrong 'Albert' in mind, but if you mean the 'quick launcher': how is that related to a search engine in any way? One is for navigating apps, desktop and offline content. The other for discovering online content.
  - 7y ago
throwawaymanbot 7y ago
YANDEX YANDEX RUSSIA YANDEX RUSSIA YANDEX -- Until Duck Duck Go stops working with Russias Yandex, I do not trust DDG.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
paul7986 7y ago
Hopefully they will add an email service and or integrate iCloud email into DDG as they did with Apple Maps. I loathe Google!
- utopcell 7y ago
  > I loathe Google! wow..
  - paul7986 7y ago
    They blatantly steal intellectual property from the little guy. Here's a story about them stealing from a MIT student whom they invited out for an interview/demo her invention. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
    - mda 7y ago
      That is the reason you "loathe" Google? it seems it was act of an individual at best, and that is if the claim has merit. Loathe is a heavy word, weird.
      - paul7986 7y ago
        If you read the HN thread... I tell my similar story of being invited and meeting Google ATAP. They are pigs and its not just that one R&D department either!
        mda 7y ago
        I call bullshit. But yeah.
        paul7986 7y ago
        Bullshit ... that they invited me out to demo to discuss putting my technology (SpeakerBlast) into the Moto X in 2013 or about the MIT student? In her blog post she has emails showing them getting caught in the act. As for me here's the now expired NDA they had me sign; Google in 2013 just bought Motorola and they were working on the Moto X. https://ryanspahn.com/motorola-google-Expired-NDA2013.pdf https://ryanspahn.com/motorola-google-Expired-NDA2013.pdf I don't lie! What do I get from telling people that Google kicked me in the face? Only thing I can do is tell my story in the hopes it helps out other little guy/girl inventors when Google comes knocking in terms of what they should do.
pkilgore 7y ago
On my phone I installed Firefox mobile using DDG default search about a year ago. But, whoops, it's a Pixel and so I occasionally use the OS's Google search. I've not noticed a difference in result quality since the switch.
- farisjarrah 7y ago
  I was in the same boat and then started using the "LawnChair" launcher. The only major feature its missing from the pixel launcher that I can tell is that it doesn't have the most recent Android 10 gesture navigation yet. Aside from that it seems to be a fully open source implementation of the Pixel Launcher but with the added ability to remove the search bar from your android home screen.
  - foxhop 7y ago
    I also use lawnchair because I couldn't delete the google search from my "desktop" on my phone and that irritated me. Lawnchair is great, I always forget it's even there.
  - taborj 7y ago
    I tried LawnChair (get it, it's a pun on the word "launcher"!) a while ago, but switched back to Nova. I may have to give it a try again.
    - farisjarrah 7y ago
      I love how much you can customize Nova launcher, but the lack of ability to completely turn off animations was a deal breaker for me. Even with android developer mode turned on and all animations at the system level were turned off, nova still seemed to do a lot of animating.
  - pkilgore 7y ago
    Nice find, thanks.
mobilemidget 7y ago
Are there any details regarding the hardware setup they run/use/own to run this all?
- bn7t 7y ago
  Duckduckgo uses AWS for hosting. Although they have some crawlers hosted inhouse. IIRC their CEO told this once in an interview.
graeme 7y ago
How long would it take to overtake Google at this growth rate, if maintained? I'm not saying it's realistic to maintain the growth rate, just want to get an intuition for what the current speed means.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  I don't have an answer for you, but just want to mention that Google is a moving target, and if DDG ever became a significant threat to them it's very likely that they'd do something to counter it, such as just buying DDG and possibly killing it off, releasing a separate DDG competitor product, or changing their own modus operandi. In fact, for all we know, DDG might be owned by Google already.
  - aerovistae 7y ago
    uh what that last line is real conspiracy theory territory
    - colordrops 7y ago
      What does "conspiracy theory territory" mean, and why would something as commonplace as a large company investing in small competitors in the same space fit this?
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    For what it's worth, Google did give DDG the domain duck.com, even though they didn't need to. A four letter word .com domain that matches your company name is hard to come by.
berti 7y ago
I’ve been using it almost exclusively for a few months and I think I’m going to switch back. DDG is really bad at showing results from my own country near the top, which is really annoying when I wish to purchase something. I imagine the experience is much better in the United States as that’s where all the top results come from.
- FabHK 7y ago
  1. I really appreciate that DDG shows me results deemed relevant globally or pertinent to the search query (and its language), rather than trying to guess where I am and what I want to see based on that. Now I find using Google, particularly when using a VPN, rather annoying (no, I don't speak Swedish and I don't want to know about Swedish Python groups, thanks). 2. You can easily ask DDG to show you country specific results by the switch on top, though (and you choose which country).
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Have you tried the DDG setting where you can specify your region to get region-specific results?
SmallBets 7y ago
Switched to DDG + Brave browser on my laptop and I am surprised how subtly different browsing feels with this combo. Simply you realize how "watched" you feel on Google products and the tracked internet. Without realizing it there is a "how would this search/page visit etc. look on a tracked profile" process running in my head that is greatly reduced by DDG+Brave. A chilling effect not just on speech, but on browsing behavior that we have to counteract.
- MiroF 7y ago
  I've found that it's becoming increasingly hard to browse the internet in Brave and Firefox because a. the increasing monopoly of Blink (doesn't apply to Brave) and b. how interconnected a lot of this tracking seems to be with the routine operation of sites i visit
  - colordrops 7y ago
    So why do you mention Brave if your comment doesn't apply?
    - MiroF 7y ago
      It does apply to part B and Firefox also has tracking protection.
- Angeo34 7y ago
  >Brave You are aware Brave is way worse than Google? They took crypto funds in people's names without telling anybody (this is essentially stealing however you put it) they injected unique identifiers into Http headers and their premise of fingerprinting defense is a joke seeing their browser is based on Webkit/Blink.
  - colordrops 7y ago
    Why did you need to create a new account to post this?
- 7y ago
kmos 7y ago
The www.startpage.com is not so bad either.
- jszymborski 7y ago
  Whenever I feel I'm not getting what I want from DDG (which is rare), I'll re-type my query as "my query !sp" to get startpage results. Between the two, I _never_ need to visit google for search.
excalibur 7y ago
This statistics page is amazing, giving annual, monthly, and daily query counts dating back to April 2010, and no other data. When I first read it I was expecting to see a list of the most frequently searched terms, which would be front and center in a Google report, but goes against everything DDG stands for. :)
calimac 7y ago
hundred percent transferred over to DuckDuckGo very rarely did I ever put an exclamation G for my search to redirect to google
Jack000 7y ago
how does ddg get its google results? Last I checked the api is gone. If I wanted to do the same thing as ddg, is it still possible?
- gatesphere 7y ago
  DDG is an entirely different search engine, they don't use Google. If you want to build your own engine, go ahead :)
  - Jack000 7y ago
    I mean the !g bang - DDG has the option of getting results from Google and Bing. Bing offers an API for $6/10000 queries, but Google does not - I'm curious how they have access to Google search results.
    - gpm 7y ago
      !g doesn't load googles results on duckduckgo's page, it just forwards you to the appropriate google page. A quick test suggests the format is https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=<query> (Google might have redirected me after whatever ddg directed me to, but just using this format should work)
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
venchy_123 7y ago
Competition is always a good thing for consumers, of course. I'm loving it.
markkat 7y ago
I repeatedly tried to switch to DDG from Google for the past several years. DDG kept improving, but always fell short. About a year ago, I felt that DDG's results surpassed Google's in quality. Ironically, I think Google's "personalization" has something to do with it. I don't think Google is serving results for my benefit because serendipity is part of why I am searching in the first place. I also swapped Chrome for Brave. Thank you, DDG.
- plopz 7y ago
  Isn't Brave the browser that steals peoples branding and sets up fake accounts on their behalf without consent? Edit: Yeah, I found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
markandrewj 7y ago
Does anyone know how these statistics were generated? I am curious if the data takes in to count traffic generated by bots. It is cool to see growth from a search engine other then Google. It would be nice to see more diverse options like in the past.
- tagawa 7y ago
  These traffic numbers are the number of anonymous searches we serve per day. We don't know how many individual users we have, but we do try to take into account bots. Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff
  - markandrewj 7y ago
    Thank you for your feedback.
syphilis2 7y ago
I'm glad to see DDG growing in popularity, largely because Google won't place my website in search results. Bing does, DDG does, Yahoo does, but Google does not (unless I explicitly search for the exact URL). Depending on your view this is why Google's results are so good or bad.
- setheron 7y ago
  I'll bite. What's the site ?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Hopefully not something like syphilis2.net…
  - syphilis2 7y ago
    I'm not interested in posting it on HN (though that is a good way to improve ranking on Google). It's a small static website with a political theme. The title is fairly unique, but not made of uncommon words. Every now and then I search for it on Google and get a good laugh from all the garbage that shows up.
pippy 7y ago
I started using DDG after Google settled the lawsuit with Getty Images. The "view image" button is incredible handy.
gnufx 7y ago
Why do people who use DDG -- presumably for privacy -- then use !g if they feel the need, and not !sp?
- robbya 7y ago
  That's a good tip. Presumably fewer folks know about startpage. But even reducing the number of searches that you send to Google is a privacy improvement.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Still about 1% of Google's traffic. DDG sees <50 million queries/day, Google sees 63,000 per second, or 226 million/hr. https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/seo-statistics https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/seo-statistics Google actually lost some share beginning August 2018, to Baidu. I've been using DDG as my principle search since about 2013, and very happily. It's fast, relevant, bangs are awesome (see earlier comment), and there's now a "most recent year" date-range search, which is useful. I still use Google when I'm interested in (rough) results counts, specific date ranges, or soem specialty searches such as Google Books or Scholar (though I'm finding alternatives).
- freediver 7y ago
  Being 1% of Google's anything is a commendable achievement.
jakeogh 7y ago
Nice to see the competition. Qwant (without JS) is interesting too.
- konradzikusek 7y ago
  DDG without JS - https://duckduckgo.com/html/ https://duckduckgo.com/html/ Even lighter DDG - https://duckduckgo.com/lite/ https://duckduckgo.com/lite/
p1necone 7y ago
I switched to DDG recently when google stopped showing URLs in search results - that was the last straw for me.
atlgator 7y ago
I still don't care for their search results UI. There's a lot of wasted space on widescreens, content isn't centered, and the font blows. It really triggers me.
- thekid314 7y ago
  Try adjusting the settings, you can fix all of them: https://duckduckgo.com/settings# https://duckduckgo.com/settings#
  - atlgator 7y ago
    Mother of God, you are right! You just changed my life for the better.
newscracker 7y ago
I wonder how much of this increase is people using bang commands to search other sites using DDG (where DDG just redirects the search to the destination site, like how the Firefox search bar has the option of searching on other sites, but with additional network trips). Whenever I have to use a non-Firefox browser that doesn’t have a separate search bar (with configurable search engines), I use bang commands to get to Wikipedia or IMDB, for example. I also use !s (for Startpage) and !g (for Google) when the DDG results aren’t satisfactory. DDG is still not a perfect replacement for Google for me, but it is a replacement most of the time, and it is my default search engine on browsers I use. One feature I don’t have on DDG after all these years is limiting the search results to the past year. I go to Startpage whenever I need that.
- bn7t 7y ago
  >One feature I don’t have on DDG after all these years is limiting the search results to the past year. I go to Startpage whenever I need that. They added it just recently. You can now limit the search results to the past year.
  - newscracker 7y ago
    Thank you for pointing that out! This makes my search life and sticking with DDG a lot more easier than before.
HHalvi 7y ago
Context is google's strong suit: Local search, using my email/location/phone data to enhance or outright create a new category of results. For everyday search terms DDG wins hands down. I end up using both accordingly to the use case at hand.
deftturtle 7y ago
It’s my understanding that StartPage is a proxy for Google Search, and DDG is both a proxy for Bing, Yahoo, and other places, with some “instant answers” thrown in, like JS minifiers, color pickers, and other tools. I’d like to see DDG do some of its own indexing or perhaps indicate where results come from. Is this Bing? Is this Yahoo? Is there a percentage weight from both engines? This analysis would be cool.
m3kw9 7y ago
Yeah because Catalina switch the default Safari search bar search to it.
stunt 7y ago
I'm using DDG for less than a year now as my primary search engine. One day I just decided to switch to DuckDuckGo and give it a try for at least two months before giving up. And it turns out two months was enough to kill the bad habit. Also it turns out Google being the only good search engine is just a myth. I hope more users give it a try. I sometimes use Google search for online shopping or as spell checker.

342 points by TekMol 7y ago

DDG has gotten better to the point that I have switched all of my browsers to them and the number of times I have had to fall back to Google Search has dwindled to almost nothing. If you were turned off by poor results in the past give them another try.

lostmsu 7y ago
Even better, recently I started to notice when I have to fallback to Google, that usually brings me nothing new. Still do it out of habit, but that will have to go soon.
- taborj 7y ago
  I thought this was just me and the esoteric technical issues I've been searching for lately. But...you're right. Even with general searches.
0x38B 7y ago
I'll second this. DDG has been my default for 2+ years. Google is better for obscure topics that lack good keywords to find them by. I usually know when I need to '!g'.
- klingonopera 7y ago
  What's great about this is that we're still telling DDG what searches we need to do on Google, so they have plenty of diagnostic data available to better their searches (as opposed to skipping DDG entirely). I do have one nitpick though: I clear all private data, and recently I was forced to get along with 16 kbit bandwidth (yes, slower than 56K, and yes, I spent a lot of time on HN for obvious reasons), and DDG definitely loads more data than Google for a query. Google needed maybe 20 seconds to load a page, DDG IIRC just timed out after some point. I'm guessing it's JS-frameworks?
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    And ddg can improve its results by slurping in Google's #1 result for every !g query, like Bing got caught doing.
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    DDG does have a lite HTML version of their site that is much faster. https://duckduckgo.com/lite https://duckduckgo.com/lite
lawn 7y ago
Absolutely. They're only really worse at localized results for me (Swedish).
loceng 7y ago
How often do you use !g or other bangs?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- FrancoisBosun 7y ago
  In 5 years, I used !g maybe once. I use !pg, !wen and others very frequently.
- sp332 7y ago
  I use !g for specific types of searches. Like when I want to compare things, Google handles "vs" queries much better than DDG.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  I use alternate bangs all the time, which is a major win for DDG, as it skips the "go to the site first, or specify "site:<host> <search>", which actually is NOT equivalent as bang searches use the site or service's native search. Fave bangs: !w wikipedia !wikisource WikiSource !etym Online etymological dictionary !ngram Google Ngram viewer !trends Google Trends !gbooks Google Books !scholar Google Scholar !tineye Image match search !so stack overflow !hn Hacker News !twitter Obv. !thread Threadreader App, Twitter thread presentation, preferred to above ;-) !img Image search (now DDG, Google Image is !gimg) !worldcat Worldcat union catalog !osm Open Streetmap !wayback Internet Archive Wayback Machine !archive Internet Archive global (non-Web + web) search !dict & !define Word look-ups !s startpage (proxied Google search) !bangs will give you a list of bangs / search form for patterns.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  I use them all the time. !wt for Wiktionary, !forvo for forvo, !ji for jisho.org, !w for Wikipedia, !ud for Urban Dictionary, !clojuredocs, and a load of others.
- fl0under 7y ago
  Ones I use frequently are !g google !maps google maps !yt youtube !mwt merriam-webster thesaurus !images ddg images Even though I only regularly use these few I find them very useful.
Eric_WVGG 7y ago
I use Google on my desktop and iPad, and DDG on my iPhone due to Google AMP. While I find that DDG is pretty good for anything work related (e.g. programming stuff), it’s mostly worthless for things like "best chinese food in [some neighborhood]" or "shop cord knit stockings"… ironically, exactly the kind of stuff I gravitate toward my phone for.
- neltnerb 7y ago
  I suppose it's not surprising that DDG is weaker in areas where Google has leveraged their products from other markets to enhance their search results. Well "markets" loosely since advertisers are the actual market, but I mean discrete products. Google has Google Maps. That's why Google can find the best Chinese food in your neighborhood, it's learned to interpret that as a semi-map query right? They also have ads, which means cleaner data on who sells what right? DDG to me seems to be great for when I need to search for keywords rather than a concept or multi-dimensional query for which DDG doesn't have the other n dimensions of source data.
- krtkush 7y ago
  For me, on iPhone Siri handles these kind of contextual questions for me while DDG takes care of other generic stuff.
dstaley 7y ago
I tried switching my phone and computer's default search engine to DDG a few weeks ago, and the quality of programming-related searches was just abysmal compared to Google. Straightforward searches were basically the same results, but searching for error messages or library-specific terms would have a great result in the top slot on Google but nowhere on DDG. I found that I needed to use `!g` for every other search, and figured that if it was causing this much additional effort it would make more sense to just default to Google. One idea that I've had is building an extension that monitors Google searches and compares the results you click on to DDG. You could monitor which percentage of your chosen results appear on the first page of DDG. Maybe then I could actually quantify which queries are problematic.
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  That's counter to what i have found. Are you just seeing this on local or location related searches?
  - dstaley 7y ago
    No, those are a whole separate thing that I wouldn't expect DDG to match the quality of. It's primarily been software development related queries. For example, a few days ago I searched for "react dnd expected to find a valid target" on Google, and the first result is a GitHub issue describing the issue. All the results on the first page are related to the react-dnd library. The first result for the same query on DDG is an article titled "11 Prison Truths, Revealed By A Female Guard". None of the results on the first page are programming related.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Don't use react, and it's not in my search set, but regularly and happily search for programming and tech issues on DDG. I find it's far better than Google these days. So I thought I'd try your search without the quotes, as your first result is so far from my experience. First result: https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd/issues/1127 https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd/issues/1127 Then a couple more from react-dnd's github, then the other seven on the first page are a mix of relevant SO, and github. Seems quite a few people have opened issues on that topic! Maybe they fixed it. :)
colordrops 7y ago
It's not just that DDG is good enough - it seems that DDG has better results than Google for many searches. Any topic where Google engineers and their algorithms believe they know better than you will return "worse" results. I believe they are weighting results by some measure of truth-value for a particular type of information, and this is bad for a couple reasons. First, they might get the measure of truth wrong, either out of ignorance or conflict of interest. Second, you might want a more literal search where the keywords match exactly even though the info might not be very accurate, for instance if you were researching alternate theories. Examples of where Google search fails to return relevant results because they know better than you are medical, political, illicit/illegal, conspiracy theory, and famous people. Often times the first page of results don't contain the keywords and don't seem to have anything to do with your search query, whereas DDG results do.
- Liquix 7y ago
  Thanks for explaining! It's infuriating to craft a search query containing all the keywords/operators needed to return relevant results - a search query that would return relevant results 24 months ago - only to see Google ignore 75% of keywords completely, extract some commonly-used pair of words from the query, and return 5 pages of results based exclusively on said pair. What was the motive behind this change? Was the previous algorithm really giving people results so bad that Google felt they had to hamstring their flagship product? It seemed to be getting better and better until this...
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    This is a long going change. Google has been making their search fuzzier for years claiming it gets better results for most people. For a while I personally experienced better results on the queries I didn't know the exact name of the thing I was searching for. But those days are gone, because nowadays their search is so fuzzy that it can't extract the correct context from those queries.
  - staticassertion 7y ago
    Because you aren't supposed to Google search by entering in a bunch of keywords you're supposed to ask Google questions. Not that your workflow is incorrect, I'm a DDG user and I do the same thing, but that's what Google wants people using their product to do.
dstroot 7y ago
Can someone explain the DDG business model? How does this company make money? How am I as a user being monetized? At least I understand Google’s approach.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Advertising. Untargeted advertising.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  There are some ads there. I don't think they have been very successful selling them, but it looks like search is cheaper to provide than it used to be.
- tagawa 7y ago
  As others have said, we get revenue from contextual advertising as opposed to behavioural advertising. In other words, if you search for "car" you'd see a car-related ad rather than an ad based on your search history or personal profile (which we don't have anyway). There's more info about our business model here: https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/ https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/ Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff
oh_hello 7y ago
I have had the same experience. Over the years I tried DDG and gave up a few different times. A year or so ago I gave it another try and never left.
keithnz 7y ago
I have mixed results, sometimes DDG is pretty good, a lot of times its about the same, but reasonably regularly it leaves me high and dry on an entire page of results and then usually the top hits on google give me what I want. However, I always go DDG first, then !g if I don't get what I want.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  this is when you use !sp instead of google :)

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

I use DDG for almost everything now because it's mostly just as good as google. I think there's still some cases where Google is a little better: for example with Developer/technical searches.

AdamGibbins 7y ago

I've replaced my usage of DDG sadly, with startpage, I get superior results. Found myself way too often prefixing queries with !g especially for technical or localised (UK) stuff.

Shank 7y ago
From Startpage: "You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs." It sounds like you're just using Google without the branding/tracking.
- trident1000 7y ago
  And now the question is, how is Startpage paying Google without monetizing its users?
  - taborj 7y ago
    If the product is free, you're the product. I don't know anything about Startpage, but I bet we'll find they're tracking something...
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Startpage shows ads, just like DuckDuckGo: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/180/20/how-can-startpage-be-free-how-do-you-make-money https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...
      - taborj 7y ago
        Makes sense. So I was right; you are the product. They want to get ads in front of users. Note that there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
  - defulmere 7y ago
    tl;dr they're paid to serve ads based on anonymized search terms https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/180/0/how-can-startpage-be-free-how-do-you-make-money https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...

marcoseliziario 7y ago

DDG is more neutral in political themes. You usually see some results that you wouldn't see on the first page on google. Google still has a slight advantage when searching for technical info, but most of times DDG is good enough for them too.

benjohnson 7y ago
I'll second this - Google is starting to hide things that it deems objectionable and I've found myself using DDG now and then for controversial topics.
- turk73 7y ago
  As someone who worked on search engine algorithms in grad school in the late '90s when Google was coming of age and everyone admired them and thought their engineers were brilliant, it is just discouraging to witness what they have become. Technology was supposed to free mankind, not make everywhere like China or the former East Germany. Depressing.
utopcell 7y ago
You do know that DDG just serves Bing organic results, right ?
- machello13 7y ago
  People keep saying this, but from what I could find on DDG's website, Bing is just one of several sources they use, one of which is their own crawler.
  - utopcell 7y ago
    No need to take my word for it, just search on both and look at the 10 blue links. Makes you think why they present Google as compromising your privacy, but they're dead-silent when it comes to Microsoft. Or Yandex, their other search partner.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mraudiobook_com 7y ago

Duck duck now beats Google hands down for general search. I have a site that is number one on ddg for my name, but does not show up until page 5 on Google with total nonsense and ads above it. Not sure what happened but I'm done googling.

jbarberu 7y ago

I made the switch to DDG from Google back around 2013/2014. Rarely do I ever need the !g to find anything, and frankly with all the inline ads on Google, I'm having a harder time navigating those results these days.

CryptoBanker 7y ago
Every time I see a comment like this on HN, I'm quite frankly shocked that so many tech oriented people don't use ad blockers. I use UBlock Origin, and I haven't seen an ad on Google in years at this point...
- jbarberu 7y ago
  Turns out I don't see the inline ads on Google anymore. Not sure when that changed. I was using NoScript from 2010 until FireFox Quantum came out and broke things. Since then I've been on UBlock + UMatrix. Agreed, seeing the internet without an ad blocker is a terrifying experience indeed.

Angeo34 7y ago

I really don't get how people can trust US companies who have privacy as one of their main selling points. You are aware US/UK companies by definition cannot be private regardless what they say themselves. If you want privacy use EU companies. If you don't want to use EU companies use Google since contrary to DDG they are heavily controlled by law. If you like the bangs of DDG use a native app like Albert or Alfred which is way more accessible anyway.

olyjohn 7y ago
A native app? Native to what? I'm trying to search the web... from a web browser. I'd be interested to hear what EU-based search engines are out there that have privacy as one of their values. Also if Google is heavily controlled by law, then what laws don't apply to DDG that would make me safer using Google?
- bugbug99 7y ago
  SwissCows might be slightly better per jurisdiction. DDG is blocking Tor users pretty often these days.
  - tagawa 7y ago
    That's strange. We support Tor both verbally and financially, and have an onion address for Tor users (http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/ http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/). If you have any more details on this, such as a time of day it tends to happen, frequency of searches that trigger it, or browser/OS, I'd be grateful if you could let me know or feel free to email open [at] duckduckgo.com Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff
berkes 7y ago
I might have the wrong 'Albert' in mind, but if you mean the 'quick launcher': how is that related to a search engine in any way? One is for navigating apps, desktop and offline content. The other for discovering online content.
- 7y ago

throwawaymanbot 7y ago

YANDEX YANDEX RUSSIA YANDEX RUSSIA YANDEX -- Until Duck Duck Go stops working with Russias Yandex, I do not trust DDG.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

paul7986 7y ago

Hopefully they will add an email service and or integrate iCloud email into DDG as they did with Apple Maps. I loathe Google!

utopcell 7y ago
> I loathe Google! wow..
- paul7986 7y ago
  They blatantly steal intellectual property from the little guy. Here's a story about them stealing from a MIT student whom they invited out for an interview/demo her invention. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
  - mda 7y ago
    That is the reason you "loathe" Google? it seems it was act of an individual at best, and that is if the claim has merit. Loathe is a heavy word, weird.
    - paul7986 7y ago
      If you read the HN thread... I tell my similar story of being invited and meeting Google ATAP. They are pigs and its not just that one R&D department either!
      - mda 7y ago
        I call bullshit. But yeah.
        paul7986 7y ago
        Bullshit ... that they invited me out to demo to discuss putting my technology (SpeakerBlast) into the Moto X in 2013 or about the MIT student? In her blog post she has emails showing them getting caught in the act. As for me here's the now expired NDA they had me sign; Google in 2013 just bought Motorola and they were working on the Moto X. https://ryanspahn.com/motorola-google-Expired-NDA2013.pdf https://ryanspahn.com/motorola-google-Expired-NDA2013.pdf I don't lie! What do I get from telling people that Google kicked me in the face? Only thing I can do is tell my story in the hopes it helps out other little guy/girl inventors when Google comes knocking in terms of what they should do.

pkilgore 7y ago

On my phone I installed Firefox mobile using DDG default search about a year ago. But, whoops, it's a Pixel and so I occasionally use the OS's Google search. I've not noticed a difference in result quality since the switch.

farisjarrah 7y ago
I was in the same boat and then started using the "LawnChair" launcher. The only major feature its missing from the pixel launcher that I can tell is that it doesn't have the most recent Android 10 gesture navigation yet. Aside from that it seems to be a fully open source implementation of the Pixel Launcher but with the added ability to remove the search bar from your android home screen.
- foxhop 7y ago
  I also use lawnchair because I couldn't delete the google search from my "desktop" on my phone and that irritated me. Lawnchair is great, I always forget it's even there.
- taborj 7y ago
  I tried LawnChair (get it, it's a pun on the word "launcher"!) a while ago, but switched back to Nova. I may have to give it a try again.
  - farisjarrah 7y ago
    I love how much you can customize Nova launcher, but the lack of ability to completely turn off animations was a deal breaker for me. Even with android developer mode turned on and all animations at the system level were turned off, nova still seemed to do a lot of animating.
- pkilgore 7y ago
  Nice find, thanks.

mobilemidget 7y ago

Are there any details regarding the hardware setup they run/use/own to run this all?

bn7t 7y ago
Duckduckgo uses AWS for hosting. Although they have some crawlers hosted inhouse. IIRC their CEO told this once in an interview.

graeme 7y ago

How long would it take to overtake Google at this growth rate, if maintained? I'm not saying it's realistic to maintain the growth rate, just want to get an intuition for what the current speed means.

pmoriarty 7y ago
I don't have an answer for you, but just want to mention that Google is a moving target, and if DDG ever became a significant threat to them it's very likely that they'd do something to counter it, such as just buying DDG and possibly killing it off, releasing a separate DDG competitor product, or changing their own modus operandi. In fact, for all we know, DDG might be owned by Google already.
- aerovistae 7y ago
  uh what that last line is real conspiracy theory territory
  - colordrops 7y ago
    What does "conspiracy theory territory" mean, and why would something as commonplace as a large company investing in small competitors in the same space fit this?
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  For what it's worth, Google did give DDG the domain duck.com, even though they didn't need to. A four letter word .com domain that matches your company name is hard to come by.

berti 7y ago

I’ve been using it almost exclusively for a few months and I think I’m going to switch back. DDG is really bad at showing results from my own country near the top, which is really annoying when I wish to purchase something. I imagine the experience is much better in the United States as that’s where all the top results come from.

FabHK 7y ago
1. I really appreciate that DDG shows me results deemed relevant globally or pertinent to the search query (and its language), rather than trying to guess where I am and what I want to see based on that. Now I find using Google, particularly when using a VPN, rather annoying (no, I don't speak Swedish and I don't want to know about Swedish Python groups, thanks). 2. You can easily ask DDG to show you country specific results by the switch on top, though (and you choose which country).
JohnFen 7y ago
Have you tried the DDG setting where you can specify your region to get region-specific results?

SmallBets 7y ago

Switched to DDG + Brave browser on my laptop and I am surprised how subtly different browsing feels with this combo. Simply you realize how "watched" you feel on Google products and the tracked internet. Without realizing it there is a "how would this search/page visit etc. look on a tracked profile" process running in my head that is greatly reduced by DDG+Brave. A chilling effect not just on speech, but on browsing behavior that we have to counteract.

MiroF 7y ago
I've found that it's becoming increasingly hard to browse the internet in Brave and Firefox because a. the increasing monopoly of Blink (doesn't apply to Brave) and b. how interconnected a lot of this tracking seems to be with the routine operation of sites i visit
- colordrops 7y ago
  So why do you mention Brave if your comment doesn't apply?
  - MiroF 7y ago
    It does apply to part B and Firefox also has tracking protection.
Angeo34 7y ago
>Brave You are aware Brave is way worse than Google? They took crypto funds in people's names without telling anybody (this is essentially stealing however you put it) they injected unique identifiers into Http headers and their premise of fingerprinting defense is a joke seeing their browser is based on Webkit/Blink.
- colordrops 7y ago
  Why did you need to create a new account to post this?
7y ago

kmos 7y ago

The www.startpage.com is not so bad either.

jszymborski 7y ago
Whenever I feel I'm not getting what I want from DDG (which is rare), I'll re-type my query as "my query !sp" to get startpage results. Between the two, I _never_ need to visit google for search.

excalibur 7y ago

This statistics page is amazing, giving annual, monthly, and daily query counts dating back to April 2010, and no other data. When I first read it I was expecting to see a list of the most frequently searched terms, which would be front and center in a Google report, but goes against everything DDG stands for. :)

calimac 7y ago

hundred percent transferred over to DuckDuckGo very rarely did I ever put an exclamation G for my search to redirect to google

Jack000 7y ago

how does ddg get its google results? Last I checked the api is gone. If I wanted to do the same thing as ddg, is it still possible?

gatesphere 7y ago
DDG is an entirely different search engine, they don't use Google. If you want to build your own engine, go ahead :)
- Jack000 7y ago
  I mean the !g bang - DDG has the option of getting results from Google and Bing. Bing offers an API for $6/10000 queries, but Google does not - I'm curious how they have access to Google search results.
  - gpm 7y ago
    !g doesn't load googles results on duckduckgo's page, it just forwards you to the appropriate google page. A quick test suggests the format is https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=<query> (Google might have redirected me after whatever ddg directed me to, but just using this format should work)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

venchy_123 7y ago

Competition is always a good thing for consumers, of course. I'm loving it.

markkat 7y ago

I repeatedly tried to switch to DDG from Google for the past several years. DDG kept improving, but always fell short. About a year ago, I felt that DDG's results surpassed Google's in quality. Ironically, I think Google's "personalization" has something to do with it. I don't think Google is serving results for my benefit because serendipity is part of why I am searching in the first place. I also swapped Chrome for Brave. Thank you, DDG.

plopz 7y ago
Isn't Brave the browser that steals peoples branding and sets up fake accounts on their behalf without consent? Edit: Yeah, I found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

markandrewj 7y ago

Does anyone know how these statistics were generated? I am curious if the data takes in to count traffic generated by bots. It is cool to see growth from a search engine other then Google. It would be nice to see more diverse options like in the past.

tagawa 7y ago
These traffic numbers are the number of anonymous searches we serve per day. We don't know how many individual users we have, but we do try to take into account bots. Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff
- markandrewj 7y ago
  Thank you for your feedback.

syphilis2 7y ago

I'm glad to see DDG growing in popularity, largely because Google won't place my website in search results. Bing does, DDG does, Yahoo does, but Google does not (unless I explicitly search for the exact URL). Depending on your view this is why Google's results are so good or bad.

setheron 7y ago
I'll bite. What's the site ?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Hopefully not something like syphilis2.net…
- syphilis2 7y ago
  I'm not interested in posting it on HN (though that is a good way to improve ranking on Google). It's a small static website with a political theme. The title is fairly unique, but not made of uncommon words. Every now and then I search for it on Google and get a good laugh from all the garbage that shows up.

pippy 7y ago

I started using DDG after Google settled the lawsuit with Getty Images. The "view image" button is incredible handy.

gnufx 7y ago

Why do people who use DDG -- presumably for privacy -- then use !g if they feel the need, and not !sp?

robbya 7y ago
That's a good tip. Presumably fewer folks know about startpage. But even reducing the number of searches that you send to Google is a privacy improvement.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Still about 1% of Google's traffic. DDG sees <50 million queries/day, Google sees 63,000 per second, or 226 million/hr. https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/seo-statistics https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/seo-statistics Google actually lost some share beginning August 2018, to Baidu. I've been using DDG as my principle search since about 2013, and very happily. It's fast, relevant, bangs are awesome (see earlier comment), and there's now a "most recent year" date-range search, which is useful. I still use Google when I'm interested in (rough) results counts, specific date ranges, or soem specialty searches such as Google Books or Scholar (though I'm finding alternatives).

freediver 7y ago
Being 1% of Google's anything is a commendable achievement.

jakeogh 7y ago

Nice to see the competition. Qwant (without JS) is interesting too.

konradzikusek 7y ago
DDG without JS - https://duckduckgo.com/html/ https://duckduckgo.com/html/ Even lighter DDG - https://duckduckgo.com/lite/ https://duckduckgo.com/lite/

p1necone 7y ago

I switched to DDG recently when google stopped showing URLs in search results - that was the last straw for me.

atlgator 7y ago

I still don't care for their search results UI. There's a lot of wasted space on widescreens, content isn't centered, and the font blows. It really triggers me.

thekid314 7y ago
Try adjusting the settings, you can fix all of them: https://duckduckgo.com/settings# https://duckduckgo.com/settings#
- atlgator 7y ago
  Mother of God, you are right! You just changed my life for the better.

newscracker 7y ago

I wonder how much of this increase is people using bang commands to search other sites using DDG (where DDG just redirects the search to the destination site, like how the Firefox search bar has the option of searching on other sites, but with additional network trips). Whenever I have to use a non-Firefox browser that doesn’t have a separate search bar (with configurable search engines), I use bang commands to get to Wikipedia or IMDB, for example. I also use !s (for Startpage) and !g (for Google) when the DDG results aren’t satisfactory. DDG is still not a perfect replacement for Google for me, but it is a replacement most of the time, and it is my default search engine on browsers I use. One feature I don’t have on DDG after all these years is limiting the search results to the past year. I go to Startpage whenever I need that.

bn7t 7y ago
>One feature I don’t have on DDG after all these years is limiting the search results to the past year. I go to Startpage whenever I need that. They added it just recently. You can now limit the search results to the past year.
- newscracker 7y ago
  Thank you for pointing that out! This makes my search life and sticking with DDG a lot more easier than before.

HHalvi 7y ago

Context is google's strong suit: Local search, using my email/location/phone data to enhance or outright create a new category of results. For everyday search terms DDG wins hands down. I end up using both accordingly to the use case at hand.

deftturtle 7y ago

It’s my understanding that StartPage is a proxy for Google Search, and DDG is both a proxy for Bing, Yahoo, and other places, with some “instant answers” thrown in, like JS minifiers, color pickers, and other tools. I’d like to see DDG do some of its own indexing or perhaps indicate where results come from. Is this Bing? Is this Yahoo? Is there a percentage weight from both engines? This analysis would be cool.

m3kw9 7y ago

Yeah because Catalina switch the default Safari search bar search to it.

stunt 7y ago

I'm using DDG for less than a year now as my primary search engine. One day I just decided to switch to DuckDuckGo and give it a try for at least two months before giving up. And it turns out two months was enough to kill the bad habit. Also it turns out Google being the only good search engine is just a myth. I hope more users give it a try. I sometimes use Google search for online shopping or as spell checker.