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Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012
- riledhel 15y agoAny idea how much Linux Mint and other projects embracing DuckDuckGo as their default search engine deliver to it?
- reitzensteinm 15y agoI'd like to know that too. I've emailed Gabriel, hopefully he'd be interested in sharing. Edit: He answered the question here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3598541 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3598541
- loopdoend 15y agoI wonder how much of this traffic is from Tor... Google blocks most searches routed via Tor exit nodes and the queries are rerouted to DDG by the tor browser (yay EFF!).
- ChrisLTD 15y agoI'm curious how much DDG's traffic has grown as a direct result of Google's perceived gaffes in the last few months. I can't speak for anyone else, but I switched to DDG after Google started pushing Plus in their search results.
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoIt's a legitimate reason to switch. I first became skeptical of Google when they released the awful Blog Search. Here was a search company, with a growing market being neglected and their entry was an absolute dud. This was around the same time that they were releasing a lot of non-search products. I wondered where their priorities were then, and today there is no doubt.
- stcredzero 15y agoI'm curious how much DDG's traffic has grown as a direct result of Google's perceived gaffes in the last few months. It's not Google gaffes, but unavailability that's been driving my DDG use. Whenever google.com fails to resolve in DNS for me, or Google's server fails to respond, I switch to DDG. Unfortunately, events like this have been happening frequently of late. I'm on Comcast in Houston. Anyone else experiencing this?
- wcchandler 15y agoI wasn't sure if that was DNS resolution or simply Google "forwarding" that was slow. Either way it has been fairly annoying -- almost to the point that I'm loading cached pages and looking on that page for a direct link. I don't think ISP is playing a role as I experience similar results at $HOME and $WORK which are on 2 completely different networks/backbones.
- JS_startup 15y agoYou're not the only one. I counted three occasions just in the last week when an attempted Google visit timed out, yet DDG and Bing worked fine. Not sure what's going on behind the scenes at Google.
- rahulcap 15y agoYeah, I've been having lots of issues with google search and gmail lately. I thought it was me since I did not see people complaining on twitter. If this is happening to more people, why haven't people been talking about it?
- ww520 15y ago
- nyar 15y agoUn/fortunately Bing won't have access to this data to make their search engine better. Duckduck is good for hiding porn, not for finding hard to find stuff.
- micahflee 15y agoI've been using DGG for a couple of months now and it's been great. As a programmer, it turns out that like 50% of what I search for at work is programming reference stuff, so I've found the !php and !jquery syntax totally awesome. There's still occasionally searches that I make that I can't find what I need from DGG, so I manually go to google for those (and of course for image search). But DGG definitely meets my daily needs for a search engine, and I love how privacy friendly it it.
- zmmmmm 15y agoI've switched to ddg for my basic searches. Hard searches still go through Google but the truth is, most of my searches these days are because I can't be bothered bookmarking stuff, not because they are difficult searches. The nymwars are the main reason I switched. Ironically I always have had my real name attached to my account. However Google suddenly insisting on it being my real name makes me very paranoid about what Google could possibly want from it. I'm happy for them to use data about me anonymously - I couldn't care less if they mine every email I ever send and every search I ever do as long as I am sure it is safe and secure and impersonal. But as soon as I get a sense they are not treating my participation as anonymous they lose the lot, and that's effectively what they did with the nymwars.
- naner 15y agoI switched awhile back and I use ddg mostly the same way you do, though as of late it has felt slower. Google's social integration, instant search, image previews, and advanced feature removal have made it a chore to use and I'm too lazy to go around disabling every new feature they come up with. Part of me wishes I still had the plain 'ol classic Google interface and behavior but I guess the site is now geared towards everyday folks, not techies. I gave Chrome a spin the other day again (haven't used it in months) and the default twitchy instant search behavior seemed bizarre and jarring. I think I must be becoming an old fart... I also think that search quality has gone down at Google (ddg still doesn't hold a candle to Google in that regard, however).
- mverwijs 15y ago> geared towards everyday folks, not techies. See, that is what I do not get. Google claims to be able to create a better product experience based on all that datamining they do. If that is the case, why don't they change the user interface based on what type of person they think I am? They have the data for it, or don't they?
- elorant 15y agoSame here. Especially since Google changed their privacy policy recently I use it less frequently.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- donniezazen 15y agoOne major reason, I like Google search is their Omnibox autofill suggestions. It makes things real easy.
- bearwithclaws 15y agoAlways put a smile on my face when I spot somebody using DDG.
- eostyx 15y agoI like using DuckDuckGo with Google Chrome because its Omnibox searching is really fast. Unlike Chrome, Mozilla Firefox suffers this annoying 2 second delay for searching through the main URL bar. Quite frankly I'm mad with Mozilla for sticking with two damn separate search utilities. Who else doesn't like the slow ass URL-bar search for Firefox?
- twelvechairs 15y agoI switched to ddg to try it out, and am still using it, mostly because of the bang syntax, not because its general search results are better than Google's, or because of privacy concerns (as long as you tell google not to remember your search history I'm not too worried...).
- user3528 15y agoyou can't tell google not to remember your search history... you can only tell them not to personalize your search results with your search history. you don't need to be worried, just aware that unless you put effort into it, pretty much everything you do on the web is knowable by google.
- buster 15y agoI've tried DDG a few days but was disappointed by search speed and search results. I've found https://startpage.com/ https://startpage.com/ much better in terms of search results and speed. It's basically just proxy'ing to google (which is great, imo).
- andrewcooke 15y agothis is great. i tried ddg, was also frustrated by the speed, and returned to google. this is an easy drop-in replacement for that and works much faster.
- tinio 15y agoNot surprised as I'm also in the camp of having switched to ddg as default search engine.
- scrrr 15y agoI was surprised to read an article on DDG in a mainstream (albeit liberal) german newspaper "Die Zeit". It's getting press. At the same time, I've tried http://www.hotbot.com http://www.hotbot.com again (last time I tried it perhaps 10 years ago) and I was quite pleased with the search results. So yes, there definitely is a world outside of Google. And it's working well. But who else has GMail, Documents, Maps, Cache, Translate.. that's a major advantage for the #1.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y agoBing. Microsoft has Hotmail, Skydrive, Bing Maps, Cache, Translate and tons more.
- moondowner 15y agoThe point was, who else has a good search engine and also offers other services. I don't recall Bing as a good search engine. And additionally, there are better services than Hotmail (like Gmail), Skydrive (like Google Docs), etc etc..
- BCM43 15y agoSerious question: Why would you want your search engine to be run by the same company that runs your email and cloud documents?
- moondowner 15y agoTo provide better search results?
- lookelsewhere 15y agoThe answer is, you wouldn't if you're concerned about privacy. DDG delivers decent enough results and part of their philosophy is that they claim not to track users.
- 15y ago
- lignuist 15y agoI switched to DDG after scroogle's shutdown. DDG feels a bit slower - obvious, since they add some features, while scroogle basically was just a proxy. What I didn't like about scroogle was their negative attitude (at least it seemed negative to me). I tried also http://gigablast.com http://gigablast.com , which is nice, but its index is too small for general purpose searching.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- yardie 15y agoI've been using DDG ever since I submitted a bug and got a response from yegg a few hours later. That lets me know someone on the other side really cares and I'm not just firing emails off into the dark.
- Chrono 15y agoI like the idea of DDG but it is quite frankly of little use to me. For most English terms it works reasonably well but for other languages such my mother tongue, Swedish, it is more or less useless. I found most results to be close to useless but I have not used DDG to a great degree because of this issue. I rather take relevant results results in multiple languages while being logged than less relevant results without being logged.
- bleakgadfly 15y agoHave you set your regional settings in DDG to "Sweden"? Heres a comparison between search results when I chose "English" vs. "Norwegian" on a Norwgeian term: http://i.imgur.com/ReIa5.png http://i.imgur.com/ReIa5.png
- Chrono 15y agoAh, that might be a improvement but then the questions becomes, how does the English results become affected by me changing it to Swedish? To be fair I do most of my searches in English and therefore it might cause irrelevant results again. Changing back and forth depending on what language I am search for is hardly ideal. Will have a look to see how it affects my searches.
- pnathan 15y agoI use DDG about 2/3 of the time. Like others have said, its initial search quality is not up to Google's, and also its speed isn't either. However, I do think that DDG is a more truthful search engine: it seems to search for what you ask for, not what it thinks you want. This provides, in my opinion, a more nuanced web, where interesting things can turn up that aren't highly "ranked". And, I do prefer Gabriel's focus on anonymity and non-bubbling.