16 ms·

DuckDuckGo Traffic

727 points by eitland 7y ago

Dig1t 7y ago
Hell yeah, this is really good thing to see! I've been 100% DDG for ~6 months now and almost never have to use !g anymore. Part of the problem was getting over the anxiety of wanting to double check with Google every time I use the service. 99% of the time I use !g I get the same results as what I got from DDG anyway. Plus having the dark theme saves my eyes and battery.
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  That FOMO is real. In some cases, ddg is similar to earlier versions of google where second or third link was more what you wanted but all of the links would be somewhat interesting if not relevant beyond first pages. Google now a days is optimised for top links and page only. If you didn't find what you wanted there, then the rest is not what you are looking for. Anything after first page on Google is 90% useless. Anything beyond first few links is useless. And those first links have a good chance of being filled with ads.
- mkl 7y ago
  A dark theme only saves battery on an OLED or CRT screen. LCD screens (i.e. most) use slightly more energy displaying black than white. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-black-is/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-b...
  - marcan_42 7y ago
    LCD panels can be active dark or active light depending on how the polarizer is oriented and the specific display technology used, so it is not useful to blanket claim they slightly go either way, it varies. The linked article only took two samples (probably both TN panels which are generally active black) with unknown error margins, i.e. it is not a scientific study of how much power LCDs use in general. Let's just say there is no significant difference between white and black for LCDs in general.
  - IndexPointer 7y ago
    I believe most phones are OLED now..
    - kqr 7y ago
      Most Samsung phones, maybe. A lot of other brands are not using OLED.
nbrempel 7y ago
Over the past 5 years I’ve tried DDG several times. Each time except the last I wanted to stick with it but the results simply didn’t stand up to what I’d see on Google. About 6 months ago (a year? I can’t remember) I switched and haven’t looked back. Now, when I look at google, the results actually look less relevant. As well, the ads on Google have become very obnoxious. I don’t feel like I’m being served the best results but instead results of companies who paid the most.
- LilBytes 7y ago
  I've had very similar experiences, I'd tried DDG several times over the years but around ~12 months ago I found DDG's usability and quality of searches to jump significantly.
  - Axsuul 7y ago
    Not to mention DDG now supports native dark mode!
    - BLKNSLVR 7y ago
      And don't forget lite mode: https://duckduckgo.com/lite https://duckduckgo.com/lite
      - mcpeepants 7y ago
        just waiting for DDG lite 'n dark
    - soheil 7y ago
      I can't tell if this is sarcasm or you're actually giving too much weight to 3 lines of css.
      - ehsankia 7y ago
        And you way under estimate how much work it takes to make and maintain a proper dark mode across a site. If it was truly 3 lines of CSS, every single website out there would have native dark mode.
LilBytes 7y ago
I've been using DDG for a while now, my biggest if not only concern with DDG is local specific events or chronologically close events. If my search string has or shares close proximity to either an event in the past or a local event else where of a similar name, I rarely find my results. For instance during the Australian Election recently, if I searched for Australian Election I was never returned results for the election occurring at that time (literally). Instead I was returned the results of the prior election, I assume the prior Australian Election has a higher search ranking than the election happening on that day. NB: Maybe I need to get more Australian's on DDG... Of course my searching habits have changed to counter act this, now I counter act this by adding either/or/both a locale and datetime and it nearly always works. I still have to use the !g for more specific searches but I say DDG covers 90% of my use cases now. Edit: a lot, my post read like shit.
- BLKNSLVR 7y ago
  Long term Australian DDG user here, and with similar disappointment in getting local search results, but I've grown accustomed to using other tools for that, or using DDG to find other tools for specific Australian search requests in addition to specifying, as you mentioned, locales and or dates.
- Twisell 7y ago
  Totally feel the same here in France especially for recent news. I guess Google obviously have more horsepower and manage to index in realtime majors news outlets and selected social accounts recursively.
- tigroferoce 7y ago
  I'm on the very same page in Italy. Beside local search and news it's getting very good. And I'm fine trading off some discomfort and some occasional !g bang for clean experience and privacy.
- klingonopera 7y ago
  I was disappointed wih DDG's regional results, especially since it seemed to have correctly identified my location. What I only realized after a year or so, was that it defaults to off, and you actually need to turn it on, to get regional results. ("Oh, that's a button? Huh, I thought it was just graphics...")
teeray 7y ago
Bang commands[0] really sealed DDG for me. I know Firefox had install-your-own search plugins forever, but the total lack of friction of typing “!yt badgerbadgerbadger” to get specifically YouTube results was fantastic. !g (search on Google) also makes it far easier to switch. Don’t like the results? Prefix !g and try again. My other favorites: !sr [name of subreddit] - much faster than “reddit.com/r/[name]” !r - Reddit !w - Wikipedia !cache - get Google’s cache of a page !hn - HN Search !godoc - Search godoc.org for documentation on a Go package. Your favorite language is probably represented EDIT: formatting [0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
- sdrothrock 7y ago
  This is an offshoot discussion and I have nothing against DDG or bang commands -- just presenting another side of convenient searches. > I know Firefox had install-your-own search plugins forever, but the total lack of friction of typing “!yt badgerbadgerbadger” to get specifically YouTube results was fantastic. I find "use your own search" to be much less friction than going through DDG since it takes me right to results from the custom search, rather than having to redirect through DDG before going to the results. (Edited to add the following) I'm not going to lie and say that it doesn't make me a little paranoid to think of EVERY search I do going through one provider regardless of their current privacy stance. I've used them since 2002ish in Opera, continued using them in Chrome, and now I use them in Firefox. AFAIK you don't even need "install-your-own search plugins" -- just right-click on the search box on the site you want to search, and add keyword. For example, I have "aj" for Amazon Japan and "au" for Amazon US, so I can just hit cmd-t for a new tab and type "au pretzels" directly in the address bar. This has the advantage of letting you define your own, too.
  - grimgrin 7y ago
    There's a thing I wish FF had that Chrome has had for a long, long time (an older comment of mine): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20056174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20056174 re: ease of searching within sites and building that availability (of sites) up
dfee 7y ago
Honest question: what distinguishes DDG from Google or Bing? Why shouldn’t they (or won’t they) follow the same trajectory as our once beloved “don’t be evil” Google of the late 2000s? I’ve used DDG off and on, and I think the interface is fine (perhaps better these days as Google seems to have gotten worse), but I see the idea of selling clicks as being too lucrative. Are we just rooting for the downfall of the incumbent / the rise of the underdog?
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  > [You Either Die a Hero, or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become the Villain] There is nothing to say what happened to Google wouldn’t happen to other companies. I assume some leaders have more self-control. But... I think the larger issue at hand isn’t to prevent it with Just One More Law (tm) or anything like that, but to instead actively chose to not use a fallen companies product and increase the awareness that Cool Company is now Evil Company. Let the problem correct itself.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  Because their business model is built on privacy and not necessarily search tech. See my previous comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22078338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22078338 In many ways they are more like a VPN company — a proxy for hire. If they want to expand, a good way would be to acquire Keybase or maybe something like https://bloom.sh https://bloom.sh and continue exploiting the inferior Google alternatives market.
  - ramblerman 7y ago
    A business model implies making some sort of profit. How are they funding themselves currently?
    - soraminazuki 7y ago
      Contextual ads that don't spy on you. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/advertising-and-affiliates/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...
sdan 7y ago
Unlike some other comments, I use Google mainly and DuckDuckGo sometimes. As I'm building a product or doing some other imperitive job, I'm not focused on privacy (other than the fact that I put on AlgoVPN and switch between my VPNs often) than getting results that fix bugs or genuinely help me. Sometimes when I'm searching pretty vague/generic queries I go to DDG because there's a ton of websites that hack their SEO to the top and DDG alleviates that. As Google recently rolled out its horrible UI I may go to DDG a bit more, but at the end of the day I just need good search results, regardless of which platform (which both engines provides, but based on if the query is generic or not)
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
I made the switch today, I’m liking it so far. Google results just aren’t relevant anymore, I don’t like scrolling through obvious keyword spam sites that are full of nothing of value.
Dawny33 7y ago
As long as the search results don't need to be extremely localized, I found DDG much better and less obnoxious for a year. Still can't get away from "Pizzerias around me" style queries on G + not expecting DDG to take these up anytime soon, as they are probably like 10% of my search queries per day anyways.
- dangson 7y ago
  DDG gives you the option to have it detect your location or you can set your location manually. I just set mine to approximately my usual location and it gives pretty good location-based results. For example, “pizza near me” shows a map with a bunch of nearby pizzerias.
- archi42 7y ago
  Similar for me: If I want to look up a doctors phone number or the location/opening hours of a shop I still fall back to Google.
Shank 7y ago
I've been really skeptical of DDG, but one of my favorite features they've implemented is the system wide dark mode support on macOS and iOS. It's worth using just so I don't burn my eyes out on Google's solid white results page at night, with the option to jump to it if I need it. The results are sometimes worse, but at this point, I'm pretty happy with DDG. DuckDuckHack is discontinued though, which is a shame. I feel like it's one of their advantages (letting the community write new features into the engine), but they don't seem to want to do anything with it.
jmarbach 7y ago
Ironically I just made the switch to DDG today with Firefox because Google’s results have become so polluted and irrelevant. I expected Firefox to ship with DDG as the default but alas it did not to my surprise. Why is Google still the default in Firefox?
- osamagirl69 7y ago
  A significant fraction of Mozilla's funding comes from google paying to make google the default. I am not sure what the dollar value of this agreement was, but it was a sizable fraction of a billion dollars a year last I checked.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  google pays firefox for it
- hatch_q 7y ago
  Google pays Mozilla to have Google as default search. If DDG comes with hefty sum to Mozilla - they'll change it.
- pheug 7y ago
  Because Google pays them to do it and essentially to a large extent sponsors Firefox's development. Would you rather have Firefox die due to lack of funding?
andrenotgiant 7y ago
I love DDG, I just want to point out that everyone is hating on Google's new search results, in part because of a distracting favicon, and DuckDuckGo results have had similar favicons for months now.
- bn7t 7y ago
  While they do have a favicon they however still show the url.
- rdlw 7y ago
  You can turn off the favicons under Settings -> Other Settings -> Appearance, the bottom option.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
  People who complain about the favicon don't understand what their real problem is. It's the extremely distracting breadcrumb above the result's title. DuckDuckGo and Qwant have favicons in their search results and they don't cause the same UX problems.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Can't say I ever noticed the favicons at all, nor do I see any comments complaining about them. I don't think favicons are Google's problem, I see no evidence for this hypothesis. A more likely problem is the information density of the results pages. Google rarely manages to put more than a single search result above the fold on my screen, while DDG generally gets in six. That, unlike favicons, is a huge disparity between the two.
  - izacus 7y ago
    There is a post with 600+ complaint comments on first page city more than a day now... How can you say "you don't see any comments complaining"?
    - catalogia 7y ago
      I don't see any mention of favicons in this thread other than the one I responded to, and I don't know what thread from yesterday you're talking about. But since both DDG and Google have favicons on the results page, I find it hard to believe this is really a matter that has people moving to DDG. This hypothesis basically amounts to "people are blind idiots who notice favicons on one page but not the other", and I don't think that's true.
vchernobyl 7y ago
I just tried DDG for the first time, and I'm blown away how good it is! Since I'm mostly using search engines for programming, I searched for "clojure filter" on DDG out of curiosity. It gave me all the relevant documentation pages BUT here is the "blown away" part - it showed me a small Clojure code snippet on the right side of the screen, explaining the usages of the "filter" with a short and concise docstring. It also worked with Kotlin and Swift! I tried the same search query with !g prefix to google it, but left rather disappointed - it's just links to the documentation. As a programmer, this is a tipping point for me to completely ditch Google.
- aloknnikhil 7y ago
  That's not all. DDG has cheat sheets for common Unix commands. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=grep+cheat+sheet https://duckduckgo.com/?q=grep+cheat+sheet
  - lordgrenville 7y ago
    I really like this. Reminds me of one of my favourite command-line tools, https://tldr.sh/ https://tldr.sh/
- TheGrassyKnoll 7y ago
  !so -> Stack Overflow
metalwhale 7y ago
G: After this Hackernews post.
jonny383 7y ago
I originally started switching my default browser search results to DuckDuckGo about 18 months ago due to privacy concerns and not wanting to support Google. A strange side-effect I noticed over this period was being able to find things _much quicker_ than my colleagues. I thought maybe I was just better at picking what words to type in - but after we did some comparisons, DDG really does just provide better results now (and increasingly so) for the kinds of searches we're doing. The bangs are useful, but honestly I haven't really needed to use them. Occasionally I'll use a !g or !yt, but this is maybe 1% or less of my searches. I've even taken the rare step of disabling uBlock and some other Firefox extensions because I _want_ DDG to succeed.
abinaya_codes 7y ago
I like DuckDuckGo, right time this page appeared on my timeline, I'm going to switch to DDG while google's search results look like an ad lately. - https://twitter.com/craigmod/status/1219644556003565568 https://twitter.com/craigmod/status/1219644556003565568
darthreid 7y ago
this is truly awesome to see how much DDG has progressed, it’s nice to know there are still some tech companies out there that won’t gouge its’ users for every last bit of information and advertising they can
Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
Fully switched, first to Firefox, in 2018, on desktop and mobile, then to DDG, last summer. It is really good now, so no looking back.
AlchemistCamp 7y ago
I've been using DDG for a gradually increasing share of my searches and as my primary mobile browser for years. The search side has been great, though Google still wins for many queries, due to personalization. On the other hand Google also fails for me on many searches by being "clever" compared to its functionality a decade ago and assuming I've made a typo or are searching for something I've not. On the mobile app side, DDG is a bit frustrating though. About 5% of sites have major issues. Probably the worst is Indie Hackers, where I simply can't log in. After hitting oauth, a blank page with a Firebase URL comes up and I'm still not logged in. Fortunately most sites with oauth-based login don't have this issue on DDG but enough do that it's annoying.
golergka 7y ago
As much as I love Google for what they did for entire human knowledge back then, I would love for their monopoly to experience a real challenge at least somewhere else except China and Russia. Switched to DDG a year ago and happy to use it since!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
moralestapia 7y ago
A testimony on how hard it is to compete in a red ocean. Ten years, big growth and still barely a dent on Google's share. But I hope you get there someday. Congratulations to the team behind this!
akvadrako 7y ago
I would like to use DDG but it needs a verbatim mode that I can use as a default. That’s the best feature of Google.
- fangorn 7y ago
  I find that my non-verbatim searches on Google return mostly garbage, so I'm not sure I would call "please stop displaying garbage" the best feature of Google. Maybe a "last thread" feature. That said, I've recently started switching to DDG.
dt3ft 7y ago
Any chance that DDG will not turn into Google if/when they grow too much?
- kmos 7y ago
  I still prefer others causes, such as Ecosia.org or www.lilo.org ;-) DDG is just about money and they will turn as a Google next.
  - heydabop 7y ago
    Same, been using Ecosia both at work and at home for a few months now. Maybe twice a month I make a point to Google something for very specific/technical results. Otherwise Ecosia is great!
- eitland 7y ago
  For now they haven't made that turn. If/when they do I'll happily drop them and start promoting another one. But for now that is only hypothetical. The problems with Google exist right now.
tomThom 7y ago
I don't want to sound like an astroturfer but bing results have actually gotten much better too. Though search is a big field and something I wouldn't mind mozilla getting into too.
- Kiro 7y ago
  That's why DDG's results have been getting better, since it's Bing underneath.
  - arminiusreturns 7y ago
    This is an oft repeated misconception, their results come from multiple sources. (ddg user since ~2013, and there were times when they did heavily favor yandex or bing usually, but these days the sources are much more varied, and they also have their own crawler called duckbot I think)
    - mda 7y ago
      Bing is still the main source.
    - Kiro 7y ago
      https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... Sounds to me that the 400 sources and their own crawler are used for Instant Answers, while all their "traditional links" come from Bing and Verizon.
      - arminiusreturns 7y ago
        I guess I stand corrected. I wonder why the results are so much better than bing in that case?
OJFord 7y ago
I've used DDG for some years now, and never had the problem switching and needing !g that others describe. (I use things like !w to search specific actual sites, but not to change global search engine.) The only thing that bugs me is regional result relevance. It gives you a toggle on/off for present country by IP; as far as I can tell it has no effect. I get /en-us/ and amazon.com as (all) the top results whether it's on or off.
- themodelplumber 7y ago
  As a 99% DDG user: I've always had better results with Google on specific tech problem-solving searches. Not sure how to explain it but it feels as if Google Search understands better the significance of the word order I'm using in order to give extra context. With DDG performing the search it's like I can tell from the first result that it really didn't get at what I was trying to figure out. How is Google so much better that that? It's been this way for years. Still this isn't enough to take me away from the bangs and additional speed and privacy. (Even when I see some joker/SEO is e.g. abusing Unicode to get bolding in DDG search results, saw that the other day)
  - OJFord 7y ago
    Maybe my results would be better on Google, but for me it's enough that I've never had a problem with DDG to make me bother trying.
- FabHK 7y ago
  Toggling the country gives me completely different results, from language to eg specific wiki or amazon site if you use !w or !a.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    Maybe it's because for me it's just locale (UK, en-gb) and not language? I don't know, it doesn't work well for me though. If Amazon appears in the top 'web' results, it's always amazon.com (not .co.uk) however toggled. The sponsored links in 'shopping' results are always amazon.co.uk & £-figures though, however toggled. Company websites, airlines, booking systems etc. that I know I'm going to need the /en-gb/ variant of invariably appear in results as /en-us/ URLs.
tdhttt 7y ago
Does DDG have anything special that could metigate the current SEO madness?
- abathur 7y ago
  I don't keep up with SEO trends, but if you can spare a one-sentence summary or a link: I'm curious what fits under the umbrella of current SEO madness?
stebann 7y ago
I like DDG because it covers most of my basic search needs. I only use Google when I need services that are related to my location. Searching with Google is becoming less effective for me because the first pages almost always bring up ads or business-related content (like blogs that are sponsoring something or are trying to sell some product or service).
- franga2000 7y ago
  Same here. Google is scarily good at giving me local results, but for general web searches, DDG is almost always more accurate. Google almost always takes my very specific query and stretches it too far, so the results are actually for something a lot more commonly searched for. I see this a lot with programming-related searches where I'm looking for a very specific problem and Google just gives me general tutorials on the topic while DDG usually has the correct SO answer in the answer card and all the other results are more relevant too.
hvasilev 7y ago
3.5 billion queries for google daily, 54 mil daily record for DDG. That means that google achieves the daily record for DDG for slightly more than 14 minutes. It is incredibly hard / nearly impossible to compete against a tech monopoly in its core business grounds. I would like to switch to DDG, but for me the google results are definitely more relevant than the DDG results. I wish it was otherwise.
- narrator 7y ago
  Duck Duck Go Traffic Daily Average Dec 2019: 47,942,069 Duck Duck Go Traffic Daily Average Dec 2018: 31,037,684 =LN(3500000000)/(LN(47,942,069)-LN(31,037,684)) = 4.72 Years to catch up. Assuming steady percentage rate of growth and Google doesn't grow.
  - palae 7y ago
    I think the answer is closer to 10 years, as ln( 3500 / 48 ) / ln( 48 / 31 ) = 9.8 In 4.72 years, they would be at 48 * ( 48 / 31 )^4.72 = 378 millions / day.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  I don't think the comparison against google is all that interesting because it is such an extreme outlier. How about comparing against the second most popular search engine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine#Market_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine#Market_share If I am reading this correctly, ddg has about one fifth as much marketshare as the second place, which is quite impressive.
  - hvasilev 7y ago
    Why would that be interesting, they have no market share? Bing has less than 3%, it operates at a loss. Not even MS cares about it and they just keep it around as a part of the technological suite that they have in order to convince the government that they are not a tech monopoly, even though everyone know they are. All big guys do this trick in one way or another. For that reason I don't think one should compare DDG with anyone but google.
dandare 7y ago
Ironically I made the switch to DDG in protest of the Dragonfly fiasco. Only later I learned DDG results are sourced from Bing, which provides censored search in China for years. But I stayed with DDG because the UX suits me.
ojosilva 7y ago
I'm not good at graphing data, but isn't the graph exponential while the growth is almost flat or, at best, linear? They mention the graph is yearly but still their best period was 2017-2018, which is not accurately plotted. I'm not trying to throw mud at DDG's great accomplishments but it does feel a little deceiving if you just look at the graph and go out sharing it with your friends like they're outpacing Google or the search market overall 5-10% yearly growth, which means they are currently at par at most, once their initial boom passed.
- garmaine 7y ago
  Growth is the first derivative, not the second.
ISL 7y ago
I was curious how it looked on a log scale: https://faculty.washington.edu/cah49/DDGTrafficLogarithmic.png https://faculty.washington.edu/cah49/DDGTrafficLogarithmic.p... Very consistent growth since 2014.
- thanatropism 7y ago
  But lower than before that. It's a "rotated hockey stick" curve.
whym 7y ago
Any information on traffic from different language users and regions? I'm impressed by DDG's search results for non-English queries. I remember it was almost unusable in Japanese a couple of years ago. It's not bad now even in Japanese, although there is an obvious overwrap with Bing's results if I compare using the same query.
insulanian 7y ago
I've noticed the significant drop in quality of Google results as well. Tried DDG couple of years ago, but wasn't happy. This post, however, pushed me to install the DDG extension in Chrome and give it another chance. Let's see how it goes.
openstep 7y ago
I've never considered switching to DDG but I'm starting to seriously consider it. The thing that is pushing me over the edge is the latest Google search results display change making everything look like an advertisement. Honestly, it's just super confusing to me and I can't get used to it. Here I come DDG.
mhotchen 7y ago
I've been using DDG for a few years and I find it superior to google. I used to often use the !g bang to google a result if I didn't find what I was after, but over time the results on DDG and google have ended up roughly on par. And now I could never go back to using a search engine that lacks a bang-like interface. I also like that my results aren't region specific unless I actually ask for a region specific result set. I had a lot of issues using google because it was constantly finding local things when I'm looking for something more global. The way I see it is DDG doesn't assume to know best and gives you the tools to find the answer you're seeking. Google thinks they know best and if you're not after their "happy path" you won't be able to find what you're looking for no matter what. Look at how much they degraded the ability of things like quotes and pluses to affect the search. It's awesome to see that DDG is continuing to grow. They're an awesome example of a product carving a niche against giants in a competitive field and it's inspirational to see.
- 8fingerlouie 7y ago
  I switched a few years ago, and as a Scandinavian user it's good, but not superior to Google. It struggles a lot with Scandinavian languages being similar enough that search results will often default to another country, i.e. if searching in Danish you will get Norwegian results. For anything news or tech related, i only use DDG, but for local queries, shopping etc, i sadly still default to using !g.
koyote 7y ago
DDG web search has come a long way and I think I am now finally able to use it exclusively. I just wish it did not use Apple Maps. I hadn't used it since it was launched, I thought it might have improved a bit, but no. A quick browse around Sydney shows so many mistakes. It doesn't even list Katoomba as a town, mislabels it "Blue Mountains" instead (which is the name of the government area/council). I am not sure how they manage to get away with having maps that are simply wrong (the park next to where I live is mislabeled; instead a random piece of grass around 3 blocks south gets the park name). OpenStreetMap might not have fancy features, but at least it's accurate most of the time.
Theizestooke 7y ago
Does DDG also have stats for how much they spend on social media marketing aka hype stories on Hacker News?
- eitland 7y ago
  I can assure you that I besides being a happy user I'm completely unaffiliated to ddg :-) I guess the rest of the social media marketing as well is just another benefit of being nice to your power users.
mangatmodi 7y ago
Search answers in Google and everywhere else. You won't find yahoo answers anywhere on Google. I checked until 10 pages. That was my turning point
7thaccount 7y ago
Funny, I just started using DDG on my phone recently and found it extremely responsive and the UI very nice.
npv789 7y ago
i love ddg
agumonkey 7y ago
can't they show most searched terms by ip ? ;)
gharding 7y ago
If you are Google, would it be in your interest to support a supposed competitor, who really is only just aggregating Google search results mashed up with others like Bing, that appear to basically produce the same results as Google; in order to at least be able to make the claim that you are not a monopoly? Does your answer change when you consider that Google gave the duck.com domain to DDG a few months ago? If that does not change your opinion, why would a competitor that controls a rather pivotal assets like an extremely valuable domain like duck.com to what is presented as a competitor to Google?
- nottorp 7y ago
  If you read the other comments, it's Bing searches plus their own crawler plus just about any other search engine BUT Google? Also no, they don't produce the same results. Google is becoming useless.
tristador 7y ago
I wish DDG had a larger selection of swag. I'm a big fan and am happy to see such great growth. https://duckduckgo.merchmadeeasy.com/ https://duckduckgo.merchmadeeasy.com/
conradfr 7y ago
I use DDG a lot and that may be (partially?) because of the privacy thing but the auto-complete is basically useless. Otherwise it's getting better and better. I have replaced the Google search bar on Android by the DDG one and I notice less and less the difference in quality, while I love searching anything without the feeling it will affect my Google profile account.
dizzru600 7y ago
Mandy Thompson
nojvek 7y ago
Shit prediction: Alphabet acquires DuckDuckGo for >10B
davidu 7y ago
I switched my default to DDG yesterday. Very happy so far. New Google SERPs are insulting to me as a user.
roansh 7y ago
Interesting: Regardless of the value of `Day Average` the graph remains (almost) same
silasdb 7y ago
I've been using DDG for a bit more than one year in all my devices. At the beginning, DDG results in any non-English language was not very good, but it got improved a lot recently! I still use !g bang command if I don't find something, but it is nice to see that DDG gets better and better over time :-)
kuon 7y ago
I have been using DDG for like ten years, I love it, but I still use google for country specific results. I live in Switzerland and if I want, for example, a toy for my kids, something I want to order locally (for free shipping or the like), I use google.ch with the country option set on. I hope for DDG to add a bang someday like !.ch to have only results from swiss domains (not only .ch but all domains registered to a Swiss address). Of course for all countries.
franczesko 7y ago
Adding specific bangs to your phone's dictionary amazingly improves using DDG on mobile devices. e.g. for Google, I just have to swipe "bang" at the and of any query to add "!g" at the end of it. DDG picks it up flawlessly - you don't have to mind the spacing, etc. Google fires up instantly.
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
How is DuckDuckGo not have any Non-SRE engineering positions open? They must be scaling teams right now! I’m baffled. https://duckduckgo.com/hiring/#open https://duckduckgo.com/hiring/#open
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
RandomTisk 7y ago
Good, now do something about shady websites at the top of most of my searches with DDG. For instance, search for any late model car and you'll find a slew of websites like 2020-make-model.com or 2021modelmake.com etc. These sites look like they're all generated from a similar template with minor changes, with some real pictures along with short poorly written articles that are completely useless, at best they're speculative. They're just good enough to get into the top search results but don't actually provide consumers with any useful information.
rPawel 7y ago
It is time that Google adds support for !ddg
nehagup 7y ago
But it's anyway going to die soon if it's gonna commercialize.
ernirulez 7y ago
A couple of months ago I switched from Google to DDG and I'm quite happy so far. The reason? The outrageous number of ad results I was getting. I once even thought I was not searching on Google but on a scam website that looked like a Google, but sadly I checked and realized it was Google. I just don't understand how Google has turned into an ad manager instead of an Internet search engine

727 points by eitland 7y ago

Hell yeah, this is really good thing to see! I've been 100% DDG for ~6 months now and almost never have to use !g anymore. Part of the problem was getting over the anxiety of wanting to double check with Google every time I use the service. 99% of the time I use !g I get the same results as what I got from DDG anyway. Plus having the dark theme saves my eyes and battery.

thrwaway69 7y ago
That FOMO is real. In some cases, ddg is similar to earlier versions of google where second or third link was more what you wanted but all of the links would be somewhat interesting if not relevant beyond first pages. Google now a days is optimised for top links and page only. If you didn't find what you wanted there, then the rest is not what you are looking for. Anything after first page on Google is 90% useless. Anything beyond first few links is useless. And those first links have a good chance of being filled with ads.
mkl 7y ago
A dark theme only saves battery on an OLED or CRT screen. LCD screens (i.e. most) use slightly more energy displaying black than white. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-black-is/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-b...
- marcan_42 7y ago
  LCD panels can be active dark or active light depending on how the polarizer is oriented and the specific display technology used, so it is not useful to blanket claim they slightly go either way, it varies. The linked article only took two samples (probably both TN panels which are generally active black) with unknown error margins, i.e. it is not a scientific study of how much power LCDs use in general. Let's just say there is no significant difference between white and black for LCDs in general.
- IndexPointer 7y ago
  I believe most phones are OLED now..
  - kqr 7y ago
    Most Samsung phones, maybe. A lot of other brands are not using OLED.

nbrempel 7y ago

Over the past 5 years I’ve tried DDG several times. Each time except the last I wanted to stick with it but the results simply didn’t stand up to what I’d see on Google. About 6 months ago (a year? I can’t remember) I switched and haven’t looked back. Now, when I look at google, the results actually look less relevant. As well, the ads on Google have become very obnoxious. I don’t feel like I’m being served the best results but instead results of companies who paid the most.

LilBytes 7y ago
I've had very similar experiences, I'd tried DDG several times over the years but around ~12 months ago I found DDG's usability and quality of searches to jump significantly.
- Axsuul 7y ago
  Not to mention DDG now supports native dark mode!
  - BLKNSLVR 7y ago
    And don't forget lite mode: https://duckduckgo.com/lite https://duckduckgo.com/lite
    - mcpeepants 7y ago
      just waiting for DDG lite 'n dark
  - soheil 7y ago
    I can't tell if this is sarcasm or you're actually giving too much weight to 3 lines of css.
    - ehsankia 7y ago
      And you way under estimate how much work it takes to make and maintain a proper dark mode across a site. If it was truly 3 lines of CSS, every single website out there would have native dark mode.

LilBytes 7y ago

I've been using DDG for a while now, my biggest if not only concern with DDG is local specific events or chronologically close events. If my search string has or shares close proximity to either an event in the past or a local event else where of a similar name, I rarely find my results. For instance during the Australian Election recently, if I searched for Australian Election I was never returned results for the election occurring at that time (literally). Instead I was returned the results of the prior election, I assume the prior Australian Election has a higher search ranking than the election happening on that day. NB: Maybe I need to get more Australian's on DDG... Of course my searching habits have changed to counter act this, now I counter act this by adding either/or/both a locale and datetime and it nearly always works. I still have to use the !g for more specific searches but I say DDG covers 90% of my use cases now. Edit: a lot, my post read like shit.

BLKNSLVR 7y ago
Long term Australian DDG user here, and with similar disappointment in getting local search results, but I've grown accustomed to using other tools for that, or using DDG to find other tools for specific Australian search requests in addition to specifying, as you mentioned, locales and or dates.
Twisell 7y ago
Totally feel the same here in France especially for recent news. I guess Google obviously have more horsepower and manage to index in realtime majors news outlets and selected social accounts recursively.
tigroferoce 7y ago
I'm on the very same page in Italy. Beside local search and news it's getting very good. And I'm fine trading off some discomfort and some occasional !g bang for clean experience and privacy.
klingonopera 7y ago
I was disappointed wih DDG's regional results, especially since it seemed to have correctly identified my location. What I only realized after a year or so, was that it defaults to off, and you actually need to turn it on, to get regional results. ("Oh, that's a button? Huh, I thought it was just graphics...")

teeray 7y ago

Bang commands[0] really sealed DDG for me. I know Firefox had install-your-own search plugins forever, but the total lack of friction of typing “!yt badgerbadgerbadger” to get specifically YouTube results was fantastic. !g (search on Google) also makes it far easier to switch. Don’t like the results? Prefix !g and try again. My other favorites: !sr [name of subreddit] - much faster than “reddit.com/r/[name]” !r - Reddit !w - Wikipedia !cache - get Google’s cache of a page !hn - HN Search !godoc - Search godoc.org for documentation on a Go package. Your favorite language is probably represented EDIT: formatting [0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang

sdrothrock 7y ago
This is an offshoot discussion and I have nothing against DDG or bang commands -- just presenting another side of convenient searches. > I know Firefox had install-your-own search plugins forever, but the total lack of friction of typing “!yt badgerbadgerbadger” to get specifically YouTube results was fantastic. I find "use your own search" to be much less friction than going through DDG since it takes me right to results from the custom search, rather than having to redirect through DDG before going to the results. (Edited to add the following) I'm not going to lie and say that it doesn't make me a little paranoid to think of EVERY search I do going through one provider regardless of their current privacy stance. I've used them since 2002ish in Opera, continued using them in Chrome, and now I use them in Firefox. AFAIK you don't even need "install-your-own search plugins" -- just right-click on the search box on the site you want to search, and add keyword. For example, I have "aj" for Amazon Japan and "au" for Amazon US, so I can just hit cmd-t for a new tab and type "au pretzels" directly in the address bar. This has the advantage of letting you define your own, too.
- grimgrin 7y ago
  There's a thing I wish FF had that Chrome has had for a long, long time (an older comment of mine): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20056174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20056174 re: ease of searching within sites and building that availability (of sites) up

dfee 7y ago

Honest question: what distinguishes DDG from Google or Bing? Why shouldn’t they (or won’t they) follow the same trajectory as our once beloved “don’t be evil” Google of the late 2000s? I’ve used DDG off and on, and I think the interface is fine (perhaps better these days as Google seems to have gotten worse), but I see the idea of selling clicks as being too lucrative. Are we just rooting for the downfall of the incumbent / the rise of the underdog?

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
> [You Either Die a Hero, or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become the Villain] There is nothing to say what happened to Google wouldn’t happen to other companies. I assume some leaders have more self-control. But... I think the larger issue at hand isn’t to prevent it with Just One More Law (tm) or anything like that, but to instead actively chose to not use a fallen companies product and increase the awareness that Cool Company is now Evil Company. Let the problem correct itself.
sansnomme 7y ago
Because their business model is built on privacy and not necessarily search tech. See my previous comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22078338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22078338 In many ways they are more like a VPN company — a proxy for hire. If they want to expand, a good way would be to acquire Keybase or maybe something like https://bloom.sh https://bloom.sh and continue exploiting the inferior Google alternatives market.
- ramblerman 7y ago
  A business model implies making some sort of profit. How are they funding themselves currently?
  - soraminazuki 7y ago
    Contextual ads that don't spy on you. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/advertising-and-affiliates/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...

sdan 7y ago

Unlike some other comments, I use Google mainly and DuckDuckGo sometimes. As I'm building a product or doing some other imperitive job, I'm not focused on privacy (other than the fact that I put on AlgoVPN and switch between my VPNs often) than getting results that fix bugs or genuinely help me. Sometimes when I'm searching pretty vague/generic queries I go to DDG because there's a ton of websites that hack their SEO to the top and DDG alleviates that. As Google recently rolled out its horrible UI I may go to DDG a bit more, but at the end of the day I just need good search results, regardless of which platform (which both engines provides, but based on if the query is generic or not)

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

I made the switch today, I’m liking it so far. Google results just aren’t relevant anymore, I don’t like scrolling through obvious keyword spam sites that are full of nothing of value.

Dawny33 7y ago

As long as the search results don't need to be extremely localized, I found DDG much better and less obnoxious for a year. Still can't get away from "Pizzerias around me" style queries on G + not expecting DDG to take these up anytime soon, as they are probably like 10% of my search queries per day anyways.

dangson 7y ago
DDG gives you the option to have it detect your location or you can set your location manually. I just set mine to approximately my usual location and it gives pretty good location-based results. For example, “pizza near me” shows a map with a bunch of nearby pizzerias.
archi42 7y ago
Similar for me: If I want to look up a doctors phone number or the location/opening hours of a shop I still fall back to Google.

Shank 7y ago

I've been really skeptical of DDG, but one of my favorite features they've implemented is the system wide dark mode support on macOS and iOS. It's worth using just so I don't burn my eyes out on Google's solid white results page at night, with the option to jump to it if I need it. The results are sometimes worse, but at this point, I'm pretty happy with DDG. DuckDuckHack is discontinued though, which is a shame. I feel like it's one of their advantages (letting the community write new features into the engine), but they don't seem to want to do anything with it.

jmarbach 7y ago

Ironically I just made the switch to DDG today with Firefox because Google’s results have become so polluted and irrelevant. I expected Firefox to ship with DDG as the default but alas it did not to my surprise. Why is Google still the default in Firefox?

osamagirl69 7y ago
A significant fraction of Mozilla's funding comes from google paying to make google the default. I am not sure what the dollar value of this agreement was, but it was a sizable fraction of a billion dollars a year last I checked.
celticmusic 7y ago
google pays firefox for it
hatch_q 7y ago
Google pays Mozilla to have Google as default search. If DDG comes with hefty sum to Mozilla - they'll change it.
pheug 7y ago
Because Google pays them to do it and essentially to a large extent sponsors Firefox's development. Would you rather have Firefox die due to lack of funding?

andrenotgiant 7y ago

I love DDG, I just want to point out that everyone is hating on Google's new search results, in part because of a distracting favicon, and DuckDuckGo results have had similar favicons for months now.

bn7t 7y ago
While they do have a favicon they however still show the url.
rdlw 7y ago
You can turn off the favicons under Settings -> Other Settings -> Appearance, the bottom option.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
People who complain about the favicon don't understand what their real problem is. It's the extremely distracting breadcrumb above the result's title. DuckDuckGo and Qwant have favicons in their search results and they don't cause the same UX problems.
catalogia 7y ago
Can't say I ever noticed the favicons at all, nor do I see any comments complaining about them. I don't think favicons are Google's problem, I see no evidence for this hypothesis. A more likely problem is the information density of the results pages. Google rarely manages to put more than a single search result above the fold on my screen, while DDG generally gets in six. That, unlike favicons, is a huge disparity between the two.
- izacus 7y ago
  There is a post with 600+ complaint comments on first page city more than a day now... How can you say "you don't see any comments complaining"?
  - catalogia 7y ago
    I don't see any mention of favicons in this thread other than the one I responded to, and I don't know what thread from yesterday you're talking about. But since both DDG and Google have favicons on the results page, I find it hard to believe this is really a matter that has people moving to DDG. This hypothesis basically amounts to "people are blind idiots who notice favicons on one page but not the other", and I don't think that's true.

vchernobyl 7y ago

I just tried DDG for the first time, and I'm blown away how good it is! Since I'm mostly using search engines for programming, I searched for "clojure filter" on DDG out of curiosity. It gave me all the relevant documentation pages BUT here is the "blown away" part - it showed me a small Clojure code snippet on the right side of the screen, explaining the usages of the "filter" with a short and concise docstring. It also worked with Kotlin and Swift! I tried the same search query with !g prefix to google it, but left rather disappointed - it's just links to the documentation. As a programmer, this is a tipping point for me to completely ditch Google.

aloknnikhil 7y ago
That's not all. DDG has cheat sheets for common Unix commands. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=grep+cheat+sheet https://duckduckgo.com/?q=grep+cheat+sheet
- lordgrenville 7y ago
  I really like this. Reminds me of one of my favourite command-line tools, https://tldr.sh/ https://tldr.sh/
TheGrassyKnoll 7y ago
!so -> Stack Overflow

metalwhale 7y ago

G: After this Hackernews post.

jonny383 7y ago

I originally started switching my default browser search results to DuckDuckGo about 18 months ago due to privacy concerns and not wanting to support Google. A strange side-effect I noticed over this period was being able to find things _much quicker_ than my colleagues. I thought maybe I was just better at picking what words to type in - but after we did some comparisons, DDG really does just provide better results now (and increasingly so) for the kinds of searches we're doing. The bangs are useful, but honestly I haven't really needed to use them. Occasionally I'll use a !g or !yt, but this is maybe 1% or less of my searches. I've even taken the rare step of disabling uBlock and some other Firefox extensions because I _want_ DDG to succeed.

abinaya_codes 7y ago

I like DuckDuckGo, right time this page appeared on my timeline, I'm going to switch to DDG while google's search results look like an ad lately. - https://twitter.com/craigmod/status/1219644556003565568 https://twitter.com/craigmod/status/1219644556003565568

darthreid 7y ago

this is truly awesome to see how much DDG has progressed, it’s nice to know there are still some tech companies out there that won’t gouge its’ users for every last bit of information and advertising they can

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago

Fully switched, first to Firefox, in 2018, on desktop and mobile, then to DDG, last summer. It is really good now, so no looking back.

AlchemistCamp 7y ago

I've been using DDG for a gradually increasing share of my searches and as my primary mobile browser for years. The search side has been great, though Google still wins for many queries, due to personalization. On the other hand Google also fails for me on many searches by being "clever" compared to its functionality a decade ago and assuming I've made a typo or are searching for something I've not. On the mobile app side, DDG is a bit frustrating though. About 5% of sites have major issues. Probably the worst is Indie Hackers, where I simply can't log in. After hitting oauth, a blank page with a Firebase URL comes up and I'm still not logged in. Fortunately most sites with oauth-based login don't have this issue on DDG but enough do that it's annoying.

golergka 7y ago

As much as I love Google for what they did for entire human knowledge back then, I would love for their monopoly to experience a real challenge at least somewhere else except China and Russia. Switched to DDG a year ago and happy to use it since!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

moralestapia 7y ago

A testimony on how hard it is to compete in a red ocean. Ten years, big growth and still barely a dent on Google's share. But I hope you get there someday. Congratulations to the team behind this!

akvadrako 7y ago

I would like to use DDG but it needs a verbatim mode that I can use as a default. That’s the best feature of Google.

fangorn 7y ago
I find that my non-verbatim searches on Google return mostly garbage, so I'm not sure I would call "please stop displaying garbage" the best feature of Google. Maybe a "last thread" feature. That said, I've recently started switching to DDG.

dt3ft 7y ago

Any chance that DDG will not turn into Google if/when they grow too much?

kmos 7y ago
I still prefer others causes, such as Ecosia.org or www.lilo.org ;-) DDG is just about money and they will turn as a Google next.
- heydabop 7y ago
  Same, been using Ecosia both at work and at home for a few months now. Maybe twice a month I make a point to Google something for very specific/technical results. Otherwise Ecosia is great!
eitland 7y ago
For now they haven't made that turn. If/when they do I'll happily drop them and start promoting another one. But for now that is only hypothetical. The problems with Google exist right now.

tomThom 7y ago

I don't want to sound like an astroturfer but bing results have actually gotten much better too. Though search is a big field and something I wouldn't mind mozilla getting into too.

Kiro 7y ago
That's why DDG's results have been getting better, since it's Bing underneath.
- arminiusreturns 7y ago
  This is an oft repeated misconception, their results come from multiple sources. (ddg user since ~2013, and there were times when they did heavily favor yandex or bing usually, but these days the sources are much more varied, and they also have their own crawler called duckbot I think)
  - mda 7y ago
    Bing is still the main source.
  - Kiro 7y ago
    https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... Sounds to me that the 400 sources and their own crawler are used for Instant Answers, while all their "traditional links" come from Bing and Verizon.
    - arminiusreturns 7y ago
      I guess I stand corrected. I wonder why the results are so much better than bing in that case?

OJFord 7y ago

I've used DDG for some years now, and never had the problem switching and needing !g that others describe. (I use things like !w to search specific actual sites, but not to change global search engine.) The only thing that bugs me is regional result relevance. It gives you a toggle on/off for present country by IP; as far as I can tell it has no effect. I get /en-us/ and amazon.com as (all) the top results whether it's on or off.

themodelplumber 7y ago
As a 99% DDG user: I've always had better results with Google on specific tech problem-solving searches. Not sure how to explain it but it feels as if Google Search understands better the significance of the word order I'm using in order to give extra context. With DDG performing the search it's like I can tell from the first result that it really didn't get at what I was trying to figure out. How is Google so much better that that? It's been this way for years. Still this isn't enough to take me away from the bangs and additional speed and privacy. (Even when I see some joker/SEO is e.g. abusing Unicode to get bolding in DDG search results, saw that the other day)
- OJFord 7y ago
  Maybe my results would be better on Google, but for me it's enough that I've never had a problem with DDG to make me bother trying.
FabHK 7y ago
Toggling the country gives me completely different results, from language to eg specific wiki or amazon site if you use !w or !a.
- OJFord 7y ago
  Maybe it's because for me it's just locale (UK, en-gb) and not language? I don't know, it doesn't work well for me though. If Amazon appears in the top 'web' results, it's always amazon.com (not .co.uk) however toggled. The sponsored links in 'shopping' results are always amazon.co.uk & £-figures though, however toggled. Company websites, airlines, booking systems etc. that I know I'm going to need the /en-gb/ variant of invariably appear in results as /en-us/ URLs.

tdhttt 7y ago

Does DDG have anything special that could metigate the current SEO madness?

abathur 7y ago
I don't keep up with SEO trends, but if you can spare a one-sentence summary or a link: I'm curious what fits under the umbrella of current SEO madness?

stebann 7y ago

I like DDG because it covers most of my basic search needs. I only use Google when I need services that are related to my location. Searching with Google is becoming less effective for me because the first pages almost always bring up ads or business-related content (like blogs that are sponsoring something or are trying to sell some product or service).

franga2000 7y ago
Same here. Google is scarily good at giving me local results, but for general web searches, DDG is almost always more accurate. Google almost always takes my very specific query and stretches it too far, so the results are actually for something a lot more commonly searched for. I see this a lot with programming-related searches where I'm looking for a very specific problem and Google just gives me general tutorials on the topic while DDG usually has the correct SO answer in the answer card and all the other results are more relevant too.

hvasilev 7y ago

3.5 billion queries for google daily, 54 mil daily record for DDG. That means that google achieves the daily record for DDG for slightly more than 14 minutes. It is incredibly hard / nearly impossible to compete against a tech monopoly in its core business grounds. I would like to switch to DDG, but for me the google results are definitely more relevant than the DDG results. I wish it was otherwise.

narrator 7y ago
Duck Duck Go Traffic Daily Average Dec 2019: 47,942,069 Duck Duck Go Traffic Daily Average Dec 2018: 31,037,684 =LN(3500000000)/(LN(47,942,069)-LN(31,037,684)) = 4.72 Years to catch up. Assuming steady percentage rate of growth and Google doesn't grow.
- palae 7y ago
  I think the answer is closer to 10 years, as ln( 3500 / 48 ) / ln( 48 / 31 ) = 9.8 In 4.72 years, they would be at 48 * ( 48 / 31 )^4.72 = 378 millions / day.
diffeomorphism 7y ago
I don't think the comparison against google is all that interesting because it is such an extreme outlier. How about comparing against the second most popular search engine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine#Market_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine#Market_share If I am reading this correctly, ddg has about one fifth as much marketshare as the second place, which is quite impressive.
- hvasilev 7y ago
  Why would that be interesting, they have no market share? Bing has less than 3%, it operates at a loss. Not even MS cares about it and they just keep it around as a part of the technological suite that they have in order to convince the government that they are not a tech monopoly, even though everyone know they are. All big guys do this trick in one way or another. For that reason I don't think one should compare DDG with anyone but google.

dandare 7y ago

Ironically I made the switch to DDG in protest of the Dragonfly fiasco. Only later I learned DDG results are sourced from Bing, which provides censored search in China for years. But I stayed with DDG because the UX suits me.

ojosilva 7y ago

I'm not good at graphing data, but isn't the graph exponential while the growth is almost flat or, at best, linear? They mention the graph is yearly but still their best period was 2017-2018, which is not accurately plotted. I'm not trying to throw mud at DDG's great accomplishments but it does feel a little deceiving if you just look at the graph and go out sharing it with your friends like they're outpacing Google or the search market overall 5-10% yearly growth, which means they are currently at par at most, once their initial boom passed.

garmaine 7y ago
Growth is the first derivative, not the second.

ISL 7y ago

I was curious how it looked on a log scale: https://faculty.washington.edu/cah49/DDGTrafficLogarithmic.png https://faculty.washington.edu/cah49/DDGTrafficLogarithmic.p... Very consistent growth since 2014.

thanatropism 7y ago
But lower than before that. It's a "rotated hockey stick" curve.

whym 7y ago

Any information on traffic from different language users and regions? I'm impressed by DDG's search results for non-English queries. I remember it was almost unusable in Japanese a couple of years ago. It's not bad now even in Japanese, although there is an obvious overwrap with Bing's results if I compare using the same query.

insulanian 7y ago

I've noticed the significant drop in quality of Google results as well. Tried DDG couple of years ago, but wasn't happy. This post, however, pushed me to install the DDG extension in Chrome and give it another chance. Let's see how it goes.

openstep 7y ago

I've never considered switching to DDG but I'm starting to seriously consider it. The thing that is pushing me over the edge is the latest Google search results display change making everything look like an advertisement. Honestly, it's just super confusing to me and I can't get used to it. Here I come DDG.

mhotchen 7y ago

I've been using DDG for a few years and I find it superior to google. I used to often use the !g bang to google a result if I didn't find what I was after, but over time the results on DDG and google have ended up roughly on par. And now I could never go back to using a search engine that lacks a bang-like interface. I also like that my results aren't region specific unless I actually ask for a region specific result set. I had a lot of issues using google because it was constantly finding local things when I'm looking for something more global. The way I see it is DDG doesn't assume to know best and gives you the tools to find the answer you're seeking. Google thinks they know best and if you're not after their "happy path" you won't be able to find what you're looking for no matter what. Look at how much they degraded the ability of things like quotes and pluses to affect the search. It's awesome to see that DDG is continuing to grow. They're an awesome example of a product carving a niche against giants in a competitive field and it's inspirational to see.

8fingerlouie 7y ago
I switched a few years ago, and as a Scandinavian user it's good, but not superior to Google. It struggles a lot with Scandinavian languages being similar enough that search results will often default to another country, i.e. if searching in Danish you will get Norwegian results. For anything news or tech related, i only use DDG, but for local queries, shopping etc, i sadly still default to using !g.

koyote 7y ago

DDG web search has come a long way and I think I am now finally able to use it exclusively. I just wish it did not use Apple Maps. I hadn't used it since it was launched, I thought it might have improved a bit, but no. A quick browse around Sydney shows so many mistakes. It doesn't even list Katoomba as a town, mislabels it "Blue Mountains" instead (which is the name of the government area/council). I am not sure how they manage to get away with having maps that are simply wrong (the park next to where I live is mislabeled; instead a random piece of grass around 3 blocks south gets the park name). OpenStreetMap might not have fancy features, but at least it's accurate most of the time.

Theizestooke 7y ago

Does DDG also have stats for how much they spend on social media marketing aka hype stories on Hacker News?

eitland 7y ago
I can assure you that I besides being a happy user I'm completely unaffiliated to ddg :-) I guess the rest of the social media marketing as well is just another benefit of being nice to your power users.

mangatmodi 7y ago

Search answers in Google and everywhere else. You won't find yahoo answers anywhere on Google. I checked until 10 pages. That was my turning point

7thaccount 7y ago

Funny, I just started using DDG on my phone recently and found it extremely responsive and the UI very nice.

npv789 7y ago

i love ddg

agumonkey 7y ago

can't they show most searched terms by ip ? ;)

gharding 7y ago

If you are Google, would it be in your interest to support a supposed competitor, who really is only just aggregating Google search results mashed up with others like Bing, that appear to basically produce the same results as Google; in order to at least be able to make the claim that you are not a monopoly? Does your answer change when you consider that Google gave the duck.com domain to DDG a few months ago? If that does not change your opinion, why would a competitor that controls a rather pivotal assets like an extremely valuable domain like duck.com to what is presented as a competitor to Google?

nottorp 7y ago
If you read the other comments, it's Bing searches plus their own crawler plus just about any other search engine BUT Google? Also no, they don't produce the same results. Google is becoming useless.

tristador 7y ago

I wish DDG had a larger selection of swag. I'm a big fan and am happy to see such great growth. https://duckduckgo.merchmadeeasy.com/ https://duckduckgo.merchmadeeasy.com/

conradfr 7y ago

I use DDG a lot and that may be (partially?) because of the privacy thing but the auto-complete is basically useless. Otherwise it's getting better and better. I have replaced the Google search bar on Android by the DDG one and I notice less and less the difference in quality, while I love searching anything without the feeling it will affect my Google profile account.

dizzru600 7y ago

Mandy Thompson

nojvek 7y ago

Shit prediction: Alphabet acquires DuckDuckGo for >10B

davidu 7y ago

I switched my default to DDG yesterday. Very happy so far. New Google SERPs are insulting to me as a user.

roansh 7y ago

Interesting: Regardless of the value of `Day Average` the graph remains (almost) same

silasdb 7y ago

I've been using DDG for a bit more than one year in all my devices. At the beginning, DDG results in any non-English language was not very good, but it got improved a lot recently! I still use !g bang command if I don't find something, but it is nice to see that DDG gets better and better over time :-)

kuon 7y ago

I have been using DDG for like ten years, I love it, but I still use google for country specific results. I live in Switzerland and if I want, for example, a toy for my kids, something I want to order locally (for free shipping or the like), I use google.ch with the country option set on. I hope for DDG to add a bang someday like !.ch to have only results from swiss domains (not only .ch but all domains registered to a Swiss address). Of course for all countries.

franczesko 7y ago

Adding specific bangs to your phone's dictionary amazingly improves using DDG on mobile devices. e.g. for Google, I just have to swipe "bang" at the and of any query to add "!g" at the end of it. DDG picks it up flawlessly - you don't have to mind the spacing, etc. Google fires up instantly.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

How is DuckDuckGo not have any Non-SRE engineering positions open? They must be scaling teams right now! I’m baffled. https://duckduckgo.com/hiring/#open https://duckduckgo.com/hiring/#open

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

RandomTisk 7y ago

Good, now do something about shady websites at the top of most of my searches with DDG. For instance, search for any late model car and you'll find a slew of websites like 2020-make-model.com or 2021modelmake.com etc. These sites look like they're all generated from a similar template with minor changes, with some real pictures along with short poorly written articles that are completely useless, at best they're speculative. They're just good enough to get into the top search results but don't actually provide consumers with any useful information.

rPawel 7y ago

It is time that Google adds support for !ddg

nehagup 7y ago

But it's anyway going to die soon if it's gonna commercialize.

ernirulez 7y ago

A couple of months ago I switched from Google to DDG and I'm quite happy so far. The reason? The outrageous number of ad results I was getting. I once even thought I was not searching on Google but on a scam website that looked like a Google, but sadly I checked and realized it was Google. I just don't understand how Google has turned into an ad manager instead of an Internet search engine