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Duck Duck Go Passed 1mm Searches Per Day
- buster 15y agoAnd that where i switched from Google to DDG yesterday, great :)
- kiloaper 15y agoWell done to Gabriel. I love the clean design and customisability of DDG and the privacy policy. However I wonder if he's figured out a way to monetise it without sacrificing user experience [1] to keep it viable into the future. [1] https://duck.co/topic/financing-model https://duck.co/topic/financing-model
- gsa 15y agoThey have had sponsored links for quite some time now, but I wonder how that pairs up with BOSS API not being free anymore.
- AznHisoka 15y agoCouldn't they just scrape Yahoo? Yahoo is very lenient towards scrapers - you can survive with just 10 proxies cycling, I doubt they do any intelligent blocking like Google
- throwaway64 15y agoAnd risk their entire business on some fragile and easily blocked scraping? (yahoo WOULD notice 1 million scrapes a day) Yikes
- AznHisoka 15y agoTheir entire business is already quite fragile. And I know people who scrape Yahoo close to 1 million queries a day. They really are that ignorant or indifferent.
- kiloaper 15y agoMy thoughts exactly. Maybe I'm wrong but I was under the impression sponsored links were not adequate to fund the growing site.
- hardtke 15y agoBOSS queries are $0.80 per thousand queries, so $0.0008 per search. A web search site that uses a premium sponsored link feed should be able to generate about $0.04 per query (50% share of the $0.09 per query that Google makes). Thus the revenue generated could be about 50 times the cost of the raw materials (the BOSS search results). BOSS is cheap in that regard. If you extrapolate to an entire year, DDG could be making about $15 million per year in revenue if they chose to show ads aggressively.
- ryanhuff 15y agoPardon my ignorance on the matter of ad revenue, but $0.04 per each search query? That sounds very high.
- vilya 15y agoTotally off-topic, but why do some people write 'mm' when they mean (I presume) million? From the subject line I initially thought Duck Duck Go had passed 1 millimetre of searches per day.
- markyc 15y agohere we go again :) http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=mm++m&start=0 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=mm++m&s...
- gk1 15y agoM is the roman numeral for 1,000. So MM is meant as 1,000 x 1,000, which equals 1,000,000 (one million). OP should have used capital letters, as mm does indeed denote millimeters. Better yet, just use the more common M symbol to mean "million."
- ajarmoniuk 15y agoPedantic: MM means 2 tousand if we are really to stick to roman numerals.
- xtacy 15y agoAnother pedantic remark is that people use $1K instead of $1M to mean $1000. I think it's fine to use whatever it takes to get the message across.
- nuttendorfer 15y agoWhich stands for kilo and is correct.
- ph0rque 15y agoLowercase k stands for kilo; K stands for Kelvin (as long as we're being pedantic).
- beothorn 15y agoI wonder how much of those come from mint installs, anyone have this information?
- codesuela 15y agoI think Opera has DDG as default search engine too
- epi0Bauqu 15y agoI can't give specific numbers but partners are currently a very small portion of our traffic.
- sequoia 15y agohttp://screencast.com/t/yZIkmNkMV8wp http://screencast.com/t/yZIkmNkMV8wp ^ Fresh Opera install. Opera ships with DDG but not as the default. Frankly I would guess that the impact this has is insignificant: Opera has a small user base in the first place, and ddg is just one of several options in a list. How many people will, without prompting, explore what this new search is in their Opera, and understand the benefit of using it? At first blush (without knowledge of the privacy protections, bang syntax etc.) DDG is just a cleaner, slower, unfamiliar google with worse results. (I say this as someone with DDG as his default on all browsers.)
- kenrik 15y agoInteresting, however from my test searches I could not find the same websites with the same keywords with DDG that I can with Google. Maybe it's the lack of history they have on the websites but the weighting is defiantly off when the #1 company to do XYZ in a given market and matches the keywords exactly is on page #2 while it's the #1 result on Google. In my test case google was way more accurate at giving me the results I actually wanted (the point of search). If they can get some Google search Fu in there without doing a strip-search looking for loose change I'm all for it and would be more than happy to change.
- Chirag 15y agoCongratulations to DDG Team, I switch to DDG around a month back and have loved it ever since. !yt, !so..http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html are really good when you want the search to get out of the way. Amazing job!
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoAwesome. Resist the temptation to create DuckDuckMail, DuckDuckPlus, DuckDuckMaps. Stick to what makes DDG great; a simple, private, universal search engine.
- jader201 15y agoWhile I agree that DDG should keep it simple, two of the three Google examples you've given -- Gmail and Maps -- are products I rely heavily on, and am glad Google decided to branch out for those two products alone. I would have listed other, more toxic and/or embarrassingly unsuccessful examples, like: - Privacy practices - Adsense/Adwords - Search personalization "features" - Docs - Buzz - Jaiku - Wave - etc...
- fckin 15y agoAdsense? Are you serious? Google isn't a search engine. It's an ads engine. Without Adsense, there is no Google. Everything else is just a platform for it.
- jader201 15y agoNot sure what you're arguing. I was using Adsense as an example of a toxic product from Google.
- jonknee 15y agoPerhaps toxic, but Adsense/Adwords are what make Google possible. Without revenue there's no Google.
- AJ007 15y agoThe dis-proportionality of contextual pay per click revenue has financed Google's excursions in to all of these other areas. One has to wonder if Google had just stuck with search, the search product would be significantly better than it is today. Instead we've got Google trying to be everything to everyone, at the cost of the integrity of those search results.
- Yohohoman 15y ago1 millimetre? Who measures Searches Per Day in millimetres?
- nodata 15y agoI read it the same. M = 1'000 in Roman. So MM is a million.
- coob 15y agoMM is a million. mm is a millimetre.
- troymc 15y agoIn the metric system, 1 mm = 0.001 m = 0.001 metres but 1 MM = 1000000 M = 1000000 ?????
- iconfinder 15y agoAs noted in another comment; MM is 2000 in roman numerals.
- gst 15y agoNever heard of such a notation before. Probably only used in the US where people don't use mm.
- luriel 15y agoAs somebody else pointed out, MM is two thousand, not a million.
- cpeterso 15y agoMM, correct or not, is finance lingo for million (1000*1000). Just like 1 KB is 1024 bytes, not 1000. ;)
- AznHisoka 15y agoDDG and even Bing/Yahoo both need to index much more of the web if they want to be competitive. You just can't beat anyone in quality when you have fewer results to work with - it's just simple math. I hope DDG uses some of its investment money on solving this problem (as well as speed, but speed is secondary). The bang codes, privacy, etc are all great.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mikkom 15y agoisn't ddg a meta search engine (if I remember correctly they scraped google and used yahoo search api)? Or has this changed?
- crazedpsyc 15y agoIt uses Yahoo, Bing, and a number of other sources (but not google). See http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s... :)
- AznHisoka 15y agoThen they are limited to what's in Bing's/Yahoo's index, and their index is vastly inferior to Google's... it's not even close. This is partially why Google has better results - they simply crawl more of the web (plus their algorithm too, of course). Why can't DDG just cut their losses and invest in building their own index? It's much more worth it in the long run. All DDG is doing is adding cool, nice to have UI features on top of Bing/Yahoo, but what about the core?
- crazedpsyc 15y agoWell for one, results come from far more sources than /just/ bing and yahoo, and they are also put through a custom algorithm. Then there is the 0-click info, official sites, etc. As for building an index, I'm not sure what the plans are there, however there has been some discussion of a distributed spider. Obviously, spidering would mean a LOT of resources directed away from search (don't forget the limited human resources too).
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- _feda_ 15y agoI always liked the site but to be honest after using it as my default search engine briefly in chromium, i found it didn't quite compare to google in terms of: 1. Performance. There's a small but significant gap between the two services in terms of the speed in which they serve redirects and search results. 2. Features. Although a lack of features like mail, maps etc. is, I suppose, part of ddg's philosophy, I feel like it's merely inconvenient compared to google where all it's services are immediately available with a click. Also, ddg doesn't save any web history which can actually be very useful for people using more than one computer. It's not that I dislike ddg and what it does. It fills a nice gap in the market and I like it's principles of privacy. But for now, performance trumps freedom I guess :p
- _feda_ 15y agoin hindsight this comment seems a little harsh. It's not fair at all to compare the two in terms of performance when google is a huge multinational with servers all over the world and ddg only has a few (I imagine)
- epi0Bauqu 15y agoWe are working on this issue -- where are you located?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- muyuu 15y agoAgreed on performance. I guess it's a matter of having servers all over the place like Google. As for having mail, maps, etc. I prefer they don't. That'd basically mean tracking. Just set up your browser to have it accessible if it's a big deal for you. Can be done in several ways.
- heyitsnick 15y agoI wonder how many include the google !bang to go direct to google. I love DDG, and have it as the default search on all my devices and browsers, but more than 50% of the time I go directly to google with !g in the search, and another 20% i guess i start at DDG but then add in !g when i find the results inferior. For many searches, google's results I find are better - a common issue I've found it DDG's results are just too general for quite specific searches - .e.g the top result is teh homepage of a brand when I search for something more specific like "brand something something" (sorry i can't come up with a great example right now). I still use DDG as I can use the rest of the bang syntax to get to wikipedia et al, and for certain things the results (e.g. code/technical) are clearly superior to googles. I hope DDG logs all the times I go to DDG, then add in !g, to get some great analytics on when I found the search results lacking!
- secretasiandan 15y agoI don't think it matters how often you do !g, you're still going through ddg, which suggests ddg has a better relationship with you than google. In facilitating your use of google for your specific searches, which you apparently can determine the likelihood of beforehand, ddg gets more of your searches for everything else. This is definitely a win for you and ddg, perhaps even for google if it increases your dependence on queries in general. Also, I don't think ddg is trying to replace google. From your numbers, ddg is getting ~ 30% of your queries without having to implement deep search. ddg doesn't log ip addresses/track you, so they could only probabilistically identify cases where people think ddg would do better but then fall back to google, but it will likely get harder and more computationally intense as they grow.
- heyitsnick 15y agoIf x% of searches go direct to google or another source, that is x% of the "1 million a day" where DDG doesn't have the opportunity to show me adverts, which is DDG's primary revenue source I assume. So the figure is relevant. But notwithstanding that I agree with your comment - DDG has won me over and has a strong relationship with me. Re. tracking, it's not just searches that I do that go directly to google; it's the times I go to DDG, am unsatisfied with the results, then tack on "!g" to try it on google. This should provide valuable data on when a user deems results not good enough.
- troymc 15y agoMy favourite part about using DDG is the !bang operators. Now I can search Wikipedia, Amazon, Google, etc. from the same "command line" (i.e. my Firefox search box). Awesome. https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
- zerop 15y agoI like navigating the search results on DDG....Good service..
- ww520 15y agoGuess my use of it is in the stat. :) I'm using may be 50% DDG and 50% Google. Still training my muscle memory on the hot key. DDG's privacy policy is superb. Its search result is pretty good with non of the bloats. I still remember how Google Preview was infuriatingly distracting that I had to install add-on to get rid of it completely.
- myoder 15y agoI'm rooting for Blekko and DDG and pretty much anything that will uproot or disturb Google's stronghold. For one, I miss the days when Google search felt fresh, magical, and honest. Search Plus Your World just irks me, because, as many have pointed out, it isn't providing relevant results and its shoving G+ down my throat. As an aside, I'm interested to see which major search engine will partner with Tumblr. I'm not smart enough to figure out the details of the relationship, but I think have access to their stream of data could be pretty cool.
- justinlau 15y agoWhen you eliminate the reblogged duplicate content, that stream would just be a trickle. ;)
- mmphosis 15y ago1mm?
- lookelsewhere 15y agoThis is great news. I remember a previous post where the HN community suggested minor improvements on the placement of sponsored links, and DDG was quick to suggest a fix was in the works. The partnership done with Linux Mint means that they have been my default search engine ( + thousands of others) for about 3 months now. There isn't a feeling of loss felt by using their service, except on a few, rare occasions. ... I just hope they stay true to their goals it seems silly to compete on crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam, real privacy and a better overall search experience. http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...