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DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries
- drocer88 6y agoHow does DuckDuckGo do ads? Do they contract this out or manage it internally?
- iphorde 6y agoBoth, depends on the search.
- lights0123 6y agoThey use Microsoft Advertising: https://help.duckduckgo.com/company/advertising-and-affiliates/#howto https://help.duckduckgo.com/company/advertising-and-affiliat..., more info: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ads-by-microsoft-on-duckduckgo-private-search/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...
- jagger27 6y agoA few dozen of those were mine! For geographically local stuff I have to use !g unless I get really specific with my search term (which is understandable). But for most other things DDG is good enough.
- gbil 6y agosame here. I've set DDG as my default search engine, yet for local stuff I have to use !g . At the same time the region selection/force feature is just great
- obilgic 6y agoLooking at different website's google analytics, I can tell that DDG has been picking up last 12 months. Possibly cuz of all FB, TWTR, GOOG privacy chatter.
- iphorde 6y agoYep.
- Dig1t 6y agoI would be very curious to see what percentage of these are "!g" queries, but this is still awesome. Very happy to see they are doing well. I'm definitely a full-time DDG user.
- bargl 6y agoI've been using DDG for a while now as my primary search. I've found it does a much more literal searches, but doesn't always interpret the intent of my sentence as well as Google does. I find myself using the !g at times when I can tell that the search didn't work as well as what I've seen on Google, but it's become much less frequent.
- dmje 6y agolol, I came here to post something snarky along the lines of "...of which 95% are !g" but you beat me to it and did it in a nicer way too :-) And yes, me too - I do love DDG, very happy user.
- yoran 6y agoSame here. I find myself doing that a lot... My experience is that Google's search results are superior to DDG's.
- sergiosgc 6y agoAs a counterpoint, I also use DDG with a !g fallback. I'd place the success of fall-backing to Google at 20% at most. (i.e. most of the time, if DDG fails, Google will fail too).
- OscarCunningham 6y agoOne factor you might not be thinking about is that if you use DDG first then you're getting a biased sample. You only try Google when DDG fails. So you see some times when Google succeeded where DDG failed, but you don't notice the times when DDG succeeded but Google would have failed.
- el-salvador 6y agoI sort of prefer Google Results too. Specially when searching in Spanish. What I dont like is the amount of captchas Google makes me solve (perhaps because I dont use Chrome or keep my Google account open)
- kleebeesh 6y agoI wonder how many of those are "!g" queries? I've tried very hard to adopt duckduckgo but it just doesn't cut it, especially for technical topics.
- drocer88 6y agoOn the other hand, Duckduckgo news is much better than google's.
- ravedave5 6y agoI've been switched to DDG for about 4 months now. I am loving the Ads I get in youtube now that google doesn't know what I am interested in they have noting to do with anything I care about. It's wonderful. DDG still has a way to go for really technical queries. I just can't get the same results about this error or that in Java. Until then I'm 100% DDG for personal and 100% google for work.
- Airyleech 6y agoI use ublock origin, I don't get ads on youtube.
- rosywoozlechan 6y agoI pay for YouTube's premium service and I don't get ads either.
- quadrangle 6y agohttps://mimiandeunice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ME_486_PokeBlocker.png https://mimiandeunice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ME_486_...
- mrweasel 6y agoI do the same. I am a little annoyed that I can’t pay for ad-free Youtube without also buying YouTube Music, which I didn’t need. Content costs money, and if I don’t want ads, I need to pay the difference. I where a little surprised to see Linus Tech Tips break down they income and showing that Youtube Premium as significant source of revenue.
- radium3d 6y agoAs a music listener I love YouTube music app, it's great being able to listen to almost anything I want in high quality any time.
- 6y ago
- TekMol 6y agoTo the webmasters here on HN: Do you see this reflected in higher user numbers coming from DuckDuckGo over time? I run a website too. Let me check the stats... So according to Google Analytics over the last 30 days, 0.7% of my visitors came from DDG. Not bad. That is more then half of Bing, from which 1.2% of my visitors come. Over time, the DuckDuckGo trend does not look as exponential as in their chart though. More like a linear growth that about doubled from early 2019 to now. But that could be due to many factors of course. Blocked analytics being one.
- yabones 6y agoFrom the last 30 days: >1k - Google 65 - DDG 20 - Bing 6 - Startpage 1 - Yandex
- Semaphor 6y ago56.8% google 38.6% direct 1.44% bing 0.34% startpage 0.3% ecosia 0.27% DDG But I feel like non-google users are more likely to block GA, so these stats are probably skewed.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- markosaric 6y agoCongrats to DuckDuckGo! It's amazing to see a privacy-first Google alternative making such great progress! I personally contribute with a few searches every day :) Just checked the stats for our startup: December: Google 5.3k visitors DDG 589 visitors Bing 57 visitors This month it looks a bit closer: Google 2.8k DDG 378 Bing 36
- sct202 6y agoGoogle - 96.3% Bing - 1.8% DDG - 1.0% Yahoo - 0.8%
- Doctor_Fegg 6y agoGoogle 83%, Bing 9%, DDG 3%, Yahoo 2%. This time last year: Google 89%, Bing 6%, DDG 1.9%, Yahoo 1.9%.
- time0ut 6y agoDdg is so good at this point I forget I’m not using Google. I only have to drop in a !g a couple times a month at most. I am actually surprised it is only 100M per day. I think it would be much bigger if there was actual fair competition.
- himujjal 6y agospecially for local results. thats where DDG is not upto the mark. Google has an advantage there. BTW, I DDGed for the last 2 years and never been happier. They have improved tremendously
- harha 6y ago> specially for local results. thats where DDG is not upto the mark. Google has an advantage there. I've had a different experience, I prefer being able to choose the location. For technical queries it gives me better results, for general queries less SEO'ed content and when I want something local I change the switch. Bonus is that I can choose a different location, which has been useful this year because my travel pattern has changed to staying at a remote location for longer periods - I can still easily get my home country results when I need them without trying all sorts of extra keywords.
- AdamSC1 6y agoWhen you come across these, be sure to use the "Send Feedback" button in the bottom right. User feedback is an important part of improving in a non-tracking environment.
- harha 6y agoI get reminded that I wasn't using Google in the rare case where I can't find what I'm looking for and !g or need to use a device I don't own and it shows how bad it's gotten (in particular hard to distinguish the ads - and the sheer amount of ads)
- tinyhouse 6y agoDo DDG use any 3rd party search results by default? (for non-!g queries and the like)
- twobitshifter 6y agoYeah they do have their own index but the majority of results come from Bing. There are several search engines using Bing as the backbone, but Microsoft doesn’t appear to want to have any new search partners. Both the google and Bing search indexes are controlled by trillion dollar companies, so alternative search engines are operating under agreements with either company.
- tinyhouse 6y agoA search engine company without their own search engine is not very promising. I'm assuming/hoping they have plans to serve most queries themselves in the future.
- godshatter 6y agoI looked around for a roadmap, but I haven't found one. I imagine that indexing large portions of the web is a huge investment, hopefully they can do more as time goes on and money comes in.
- guilhermetk 6y agoAfter a few failed attempts to migrate from Google as my default search engine due to poor results, a couple of months ago, I decided to give DDG another try. Been using daily since, I don't even remember what Google is. Not sure if the service did improve that much or what, but I'm glad I could move on. Youtube, you are next.
- wyck 6y agoI think something improved, I used to switch back and forth probably used 80% Google, but know I now use DDG about 80% of the time.
- krtkush 6y agoThis rate of use is strikingly similar to mine[1]. [1] I made a small add-on for firefox which tracks DDG usage and lists the usage stat. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/
- mrweasel 6y agoDDG was pretty much evoled to the point where if doesn’t yield a good result, most likely neither will Google.
- 6chars 6y ago> I don't even remember what Google is If DDG has such severe memory-related side effects, I'm not sure I want to switch.
- danShumway 6y agoI started using DuckDuckGo, and one day I woke up and all of my email was on Fastmail instead of Gmail. No memory of switching, but all of my contacts were moved over. My accounts were using Fastmail aliases. I called up my siblings and asked, "where did you get this email address, why are you emailing me here?" And they just said, "what are you talking about, you've always been on Fastmail." I have no idea what's going on. Sometimes I'll go to update my system, and I'll be using Pacman instead of the normal Debian package manager. Then the next day it will switch back. Sometimes I'll search for things online, and I won't find the result I'm looking for, but then a day later I'll get a physical letter in my mailbox with the answer to my question written on it. So anyway, long story short, I decided to switch Bing instead and so far that's had only minor side effects.
- ronnier 6y agoI’m using ddg, pihole, unbound, ublock, signal. Deleted twitter, Facebook. Looking to move away from google. Things just feel, cleaner this way. Still a long way to go
- Tokkemon 6y agoGreat, do you want a cookie?
- eganist 6y ago> Great, do you want a cookie? Hey, this isn't productive. The parent comment provided a good opener for others to ask them their experience migrating away, etc, and that's the kind of discussion we often like to have around sharing our experiences with new or different tools.
- dang 6y agoPlease stop posting comments that break the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- criley2 6y agoNone of the things you mentioned are replacements for either Twitter or Facebooks core products. A search engine, router level ad-blocker, browser-based adblocker and messaging app do not replace a public messageboard or a pseudo-public/pseudo-private messageboard/events service. Actually maybe "unbound" is that because there's a bunch of projects with that name, so who knows.
- ronnier 6y agoI’m not looking to replace them. Logging onto those products doesn’t seem to make my life better. Seeing my friends rant about politics doesn’t seem to make us closer. Having only politics on my mind isn’t a good thing so I think I’ll be better off with not relaxing them.
- eganist 6y ago
- pea 6y agoThis is slightly off-topic, but I wonder why duckduckgo don't try and acquire a domain like ddg.com - It sounds minor but I find it a hard domain to type for trying out a search (when google isn't giving me what I want), whereas if it was ddg.com I'd probably jump to it more as an alternative. Maybe I am just incredibly lazy, though.
- TekMol 6y agoThey own duck.com I think most people are even lazier then you. They don't type domain names at all. They set their default SE to duckduckgo.com and then search via the url bar.
- tinus_hn 6y agoThey have ddg.gg which does your redirect
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ClawsOnPaws 6y agoYou can use the domain ddg.gg
- FalconSensei 6y agoOn Chrome and Edge (I know, I know), you can just add 'ddg' as a custom search engine and type 'ddg' + space or tab
- analyte123 6y agoIf DuckDuckGo / Bing ever approach the popularity level of Google, how will they not suffer similar pressure to manipulate their search results?
- FalconSensei 6y agoI think the most pressure is from advertisers, right? Se depends on how much they love making money
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yabones 6y agoI've used DDG full-time for over two years now. I honestly don't miss Google. Every time I use !g I'm reminded just how bad it's gotten. Between the SEO spam and ads I find myself scrolling at least halfway down the page to find anything even remotely relevant. I can't say that DDG always has the 'best' results, but at least they seem appropriate to what I'm searching for. One thing I do wish DDG has is webmaster tools. I know they don't do their own indexing, but it would be nice to have a way to get performance & keyword data the way Google/Bing/Yandex etc present it.
- nostromo 6y ago!g is some sort of brilliant marketing. Me: "I don't see what I expected. I'll try Google." Me two seconds later 9 out of 10 times: "Oh, Google also sucks for this query. Oh well."
- Zhyl 6y agoIt's also amazing for analytics. "What are people not finding on our engine?" grep -F '!g' log
- FalconSensei 6y agoThat is brilliant indeed. Although I don't understand why I would use '!g' instead of just 'g'+tab/whitespace, as that would use google as the browser search engine - if you manually added 'g' as google's keyword, or if you used google enough that when you type 'g' it interprets as possible google
- spurgu 6y agoYeah or "y <tab> <youtube query>". BUT! You can't do that in Firefox, which is one of the many reasons I switched back to Chrome (Brave) after trying to like Firefox for a couple of months. Chrome just does UX so much better. I really really miss containers though but Google has little incentive to offer that.
- 6y ago
- jjordan 6y agoI think and hope that this is just the beginning. We desperately need tech diversity in all sorts of verticals, and search and social media are at the top of the list, with AWS/Azure/GoogleCloud closely following. Jason Calacanis is saying as much today: https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1349482476612141056 https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1349482476612141056
- peterpost2 6y agoI switched back to google after using DDG for about half a year, DDG results are nice, but if you mix searches between different language you need to manually set the country for which you are searching, google does this automatically.
- Kreotiko 6y agoBeen using it for few years now, technical searches and in some languages other than English are still subpar compared to Google but you can add !g and it will open google on those ones
- calimac 6y agoI wonder why?...
- zaroth 6y agoMy nit with DDG is that I like to run my iPhone in Dark Mode, but I really don’t like the dark mode rendering of DDG. I always browse in Private mode, so switching the session to light mode is totally unhelpful. I wonder if anyone else runs into this and found a workaround?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- corytheboyd 6y agoPlenty of people saying it already but I’ll throw my voice into the mix too. Been using DDG for about a year straight across all devices and I honestly forgot I wasn’t using Google. I have never been unable to find anything I was after, well except for some unusual Hail Mary queries with exact phrase matches, but those are my fault and likely wouldn’t return anything from Google search either. If you’re on the fence... it’s literally free and completely painless to switch out the default search engine in every browser I have used at least, I recommend trying it out!
- cianmm 6y agoI’ve been on DuckDuckGo for nearly a year now and while I’m mostly happy, it can be a frustrating experience as somebody living in Ireland. When making a location specific search, often even including the word “Ireland” or the city I live in, I will get results from the UK, or the US. Bizarrely, toggling the “Ireland” location switcher on often makes the results worse - which is surprising since it will often prioritise .co.uk domains above .ie domains, which seems like a slam dunk for location-dependant searches (such as for example “buy new bike chain”) out of Ireland with an “ireland” toggle switched on. Example: there is a mobile network named Three in both the UK and Ireland. With the Ireland location toggle enabled, the search “Three network coverage” places the Irish Three (three.ie) in fifth position, under four .co.uk results. I’m at the point where if I need to search something that could be location dependant I throw a !g onto the search term by default.
- potatochup 6y agoYeah, same here with NZ. Even with the location toggle enabled, if I don't append "NZ" to my query, I end up with a whole lot of useless results from the USA, UK, etc. I still use DDG for everything but the most technical queries though.
- Marsymars 6y agoI find Google over-agressive in the other direction when it comes to location. I’ll search for “Empire State Building” and get a page full of local junior high science projects about the Empire State Building and local burger joints with Empire State Building posters on their walls.
- FalconSensei 6y agoOne thing I loved about DDG, that 'forced' me to use it on mobile, is being able to filter by date (last week/month/year) on mobile. Google and Bing don't offer that simple feature in any way.
- ydant 6y agoGoogle mobile website does for me. Steps: * Search * Scroll the tabs bar (All, Images, Shopping, etc) all the way to the rightmost entry, "Search Tools" * Tap "Search Tools" * A secondary menu bar with "ANY TIME \/" will appear. You can use that to filter by date-range.
- FalconSensei 6y agoI see... If I open the browser and search there, it shows, if I use the search widget, it doesn't have the option
- bfrog 6y agoWhen google's search fails to find the most basic of things because it's all Ads, is it any surprise? At what point did google search go from that great search engine to what amounts to an ad landing page full of spam. Sundar keeps trying to go into other markets rather than weeding the garden already sown, and its not going to end well.
- randomstring 6y agoI would estimate that greater than 90% of that traffic is bot traffic. Having run two web search engines in the past: search.netscape.com (pre-google) and blekko.com. Robots accounted for > 80% of traffic at Netscape (around 3M searches/day in 2000 IIRC) and definitely more than 80% at blekko. Maybe 90% or more. Some traffic is obviously bot traffic (single source IP, common patterns, obvious bot useragents) and then there's the non-obvious bot traffic that is random-ish, but in aggregate is clearly bot traffic. For instance, way too many queries matching the pattern "(mortgage|home loans) (zip|county|city|state)" even if they are coming from random IPs and user agents. At blekko, under high traffic, we would loadshed obvious bot traffic first and prioritize searches from humans.
- rkalla 6y agoThis is a fascinating trend - how could you even launch a search service today where that portion of your processing time is going to be spent powering bots (ad agencies?) and not addressing human queries. Wonder what a human-centric 'search' experience will look like in 2025... no more search bar, pre-emptive article fetch based on whatever some ML algorithm decides for you?
- randomstring 6y agoExactly. If you can accurately ignore 50% of the bot traffic you halve your hardware expense. The trick is doing it in such a way that the bots don't notice.
- Merman_Mike 6y agoThis reminds me of someone saying that eventually Amazon will just start sending you things and charging you for them with no intervention on your end. It'll just happen to be what you needed at the right time.
- XargonEnder 6y agoThis is both horrifying and tantalizing
- albertopv 6y agoI have been using DDG for 6 months, I'd say 90% of times results are good enough to find what I'm looking for. I even tried DDG Apple powered maps,but Gmaps is still vastly superior, imho
- bjourne 6y agoUnlike Google, DDG doesn't filter out StormFront and other similar sites (Bing also doesn't, apparenty). I think that is good because tech companies shouldn't impose politics on very basic tech like search indexes. I wonder how long it will last though.
- barbacoa 6y agoThere is a whole list of right wing news sites google will not link to without explicitly include the site name in the query.
- samfundev 6y agoA lot of people are talking about the quality of DDG results and I thought I would mention that there is a way to tell DDG about their search results. It's pretty hidden but there is a "Send Feedback" button in the bottom right. They should really make it more visible so that they can get community feedback about what results they need to improve.
- boredumb 6y agoI've been using start page for the past two years without a problem, but I do find myself dipping into google for maps and "near me" searches. That being said the biggest drawback is if my wife uses my phone to search for something she grumbles at me.
- sparkling 6y agoI am on my third attempt of forcing myself to use DDG. Been back on DDG-only now for about 2 weeks and all i can say is that it still has a long way to go to be a viable alternative to Google. In my experience, even Bing provides significantly better results.
- ecommerceguy 6y agoFWIW, we have witnessed a noticeable increase in ddg derived traffic across all properties.
- randomstring 6y agoWait, you're getting referrer strings with DDG in them? How is that private?
- anderber 6y agoCan't every site know what page it came from by using the document history?
- ricardo81 6y agoReferer is passed at the hostname level, so no query string etc. At least some site logs say as much.
- ecommerceguy 6y agoWho said anything about referrer strings?
- timvisee 6y agoHappy to be a part of it. Their bangs and vim bindings make me so efficient!
- lavp 6y agoWhen using Google, the amount of times I ended up clicking a different link just because a box above decided to load that very moment was unthinkable. That alone was a big enough of a reason to switch.
- paul7986 6y agoI seem to be using the Google bang command less past few months. I started using DDG in Dec 2018 after a story here showed (with evidence) that Google invited a female inventor out for an interview & then stole/patented her work. Overall using two search engines provides solid results with DDG being my main engine. It was cool to see DDG browser app in the top 20 iPhone apps this week!
- mrlala 6y agoTo everyone saying they want to completely move away from google.. To me one of the biggest things is the convenience of random sites that I can create an account with one click linked to my google account. People seem to really really underestimate the power of that. Like during this last year of craziness, my kids both have google accounts on chrome so when we find new random websites for learning that I want them to have accounts with, they have all had google click to signin. I probably wouldn't have even bothered with various places if they didn't have that. For my kids being able to visit 5+ sites regularly and the worst that happens is they have to re-login by clicking 'login with google' cannot be understated.
- wolverine876 6y agoSome people perceive Google to be better because when DDG fails, they try Google and sometimes Google succeeds. That's no different than flipping a coin and hoping for heads. You normally flip with your right hand, but when it comes up tails you try again with your left. About half the time, your left succeeds where your right fails, therefore your left hand is better at flipping coins. I'm sure there's a name for that bias? (Notice that you could do it in reverse and draw the reverse conclusion - the same goes for Google and DDG.) To actually compare them, you'd need to do the same searches on both, not just the ones where DDG did poorly.
- unglaublich 6y agousing DDG full-time now for a year. results are quite relevant. better than the crap Google shows you these days. only localization remains an issue. DDG would return shops, restaurants etc on the other side of the world whereas Google would return those within a few miles. I know that comes with a price...
- jklinger410 6y agoSomething I'd like to know as a user is how I can help improve search results on DDG
- quantumofalpha 6y agoUse Bing every now and then, the underlying web search engine of DDG. They will track your clicks, unlike DDG, but those clicks are vital for training their ranking system.
- FillardMillmore 6y agoThey have a 'Send Feedback' utility in the bottom right of search result pages.
- esturk 6y agoDDG really needs to clean out their ! Shortcuts. Some of them simply doesn't work or out right banned like r/the_donald.
- XargonEnder 6y agoCan you tell us more or perhaps provide a link?
- emrah 6y agoI would be willing to create an account (at least for some contexts, like work) and let DDG track me as long as it would improve my search results and I had 100% visibility and control over what they retain.
- l0b0 6y agoFantastic! I wonder if anyone has researched how quickly users can find what they are looking for on different search engines, after a super quick introduction to the basic controls. Of course, everyone has been primed by whatever search engine they have used the most, so that would have to be accounted for. A particularly common result on DDG which bugs me is whenever I'm searching for something which I'm positive will be answered on Stack Overflow the first page of results includes one Stack Overflow question and the rest of the results are from other sites. This can be annoying when the search is basically "how to convert X to Y", and the only Stack Overflow result is "how to convert Y to X". The similar results for each site shown on Google is a killer app in these situations, and is probably the main reason I "!g".
- skyzadev 6y agoI'd gladly use DDG but they still suck compared to Google when it comes to searching for anything dev related.
- 3guk 6y agoI've tried to use DuckDuckGo a few times now - I really wish that they would write their own indexer and maintain their own index, it frustrates me that they rely on the Bing Index - which frequently favours low quality SEO optimised content or doesn't have the result you are looking for on the first page... Each time I find myself going back to Google as it frequently surfaces the result I'm looking for on the first page.