13 ms·

DuckDuckGo is blowing up

1221 points by MatthewPhillips 15y ago

jzycrzy 15y ago
I've been using DuckDuckGo more and more lately since google added a redirect[1] for any link clicked in their search results a couple months ago. I'm in China and most links I click on google don't load. Perhaps because China is messing with DNS queries to google.com and trying to limit the amount of data they collect on their citizens. [1] The google link for duckduckgo search result first hits this link, and this is where the pageload errors occur: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F&ei=xR91T-muMcKhiQfN09GXDw&usg=AFQjCNH5TNBuuoMvRfveNpZRVgyl05DMEw http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...
deleted 15y ago
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Gobitron 15y ago
That's a fantastic looking curve, but keep in mind the absolute numbers shown. They are at 1.6 million direct queries per day. Still a ways to go to be truly competitive (3 billion per day for Google). Still, if they keep up with current growth rates, they could do some real damage.
- joshmlewis 15y ago
  Just one at a time is all it takes. :) Replace starfish with searches..and bend your imagination a bit. "A man was walking along a deserted beach at sunset. As he walked he could see a young boy in the distance, as he drew nearer he noticed that the boy kept bending down, picking something up and throwing it into the water. Time and again he kept hurling things into the ocean. As the man approached even closer, he was able to see that the boy was picking up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at a time he was throwing them back into the water. The man asked the boy what he was doing, the boy replied,"I am throwing these washed up starfish back into the ocean, or else they will die through lack of oxygen. "But", said the man, "You can't possibly save them all, there are thousands on this beach, and this must be happening on hundreds of beaches along the coast. You can't possibly make a difference." The boy looked down, frowning for a moment; then bent down to pick up another starfish, smiling as he threw it back into the sea. He replied, "I made a huge difference to that one!""
mise 15y ago
I certainly felt some difficulty first in setting Duck Duck Go as my default search engine. Google trains you repeatedly, implicitly, over the years on how to optimise your query for Google. I often still find myself adding "!g" to my DDG query to perform the search on Google, but at least Google isn't my first point of contact any more.
PaulHoule 15y ago
if i get that right, people are doing a lot more API calls than direct searches... Which begs the questions of (i) who they are, (ii) what they're doing, and (iii) how this can be monetized?
- muyuu 15y ago
  The graph is for direct searches though. You can see API calls stable at around 9M for quite a while, and direct searches have sky-rocketed. You're right that there are a lot more API calls still (~x6). But the gap is closing quickly.
- derda 15y ago
  Maybe these numbers include search requests from browser-search fields and similar. Otherwise I would be very interested in those sources, too.
- prakash 15y ago
  Fastestfox, Cyberspace and others use our API: http://duckduckgo.com/api.html http://duckduckgo.com/api.html Would love to hear ideas on (iii).
TeeWEE 15y ago
I use duckduckgo as my default search engine now. If i need some more info i just use g!. Really like the bang syntax! And its doesnt track all my stuff, and this stupid google+ (failure) is not integrated. I just want to search stuff. Google did it right in the past, now duck duck go is my uberlord.
jstalin 15y ago
I <3 DDG.
geoffw8 15y ago
Wow, thats a great curve. Just wanted to throw in my personal experience with DuckDuckGo, and it doesn't necessarily reflect on DuckDuckGo specifically, however: After seeing them pop up here once or twice quite recently I thought I'd give it a go, I opened up preferences in Chrome and switched my default search over to DDG. It felt good, made a nice change but was certainly a bit "odd". I found what I wanted, most of the time albeit it with a slight drop in quality vs Google. But my biggest gripe with them was confidence. I'd just started out at a new job as a programmer and as you can imagine, I was searching for a good few things, usually things I was struggling with and I just didn't feel sure that I was getting the best results I possibly could be. You might think thats totally crazy, but when your battling an issue as many of you know, you want more than anything to work out whats going on. I didn't have any margin for error, I wanted the best results right there that second. Specifics aside, knowing that Google is far superior in their results makes it real difficult to use another search engine really, extra features (!so etc) or no extra features. I personally search because I need to "find" something and I usually don't know where that something is, opening up Stack Overflow isn't that much of a chore for me. Its the other bit I need help with. Anyway, I commend their mission and hope they succeed in taking a fair slice of the market. I think he's a great entrepreneur and I wish him the best of luck. I can't imagine what it must be like to be head on with... Google.
- pubby 15y ago
  I generally stick to Google for programming related searches and use DDG for the rest. Hopefully DDG improves to the point where I can use it 100% of the time.
  - aidos 15y ago
    Interestingly I switched to DDG because I was having to quote too many programming terms in Google. All of them sometimes, just to stop Google from autocorrecting. I still have 'g' wired as my omnibar shortcut for Google though as I don't always find what I'm looking for on DDG.
    - gala8y 15y ago
spodek 15y ago
People care about privacy and not being tracked. I predict Google's arms race with Facebook to profit more from user's data will augment this growth. And/or dampen that arms race. That's why I search with DuckDuckGo by default (previously Scroogle).
- jackery 15y ago
  With everyone's concern with privacy, I'm surprised Ask Eraser isn't mentioned more frequently (http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/about/askeraser.shtml http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/about/askeraser.shtml).
  - chaostheory 15y ago
    I used to use Ask until they made an announcement that they were leaving the search business and staying in the toolbar sector. I'm surprised they're still up.
- RichClaxton 15y ago
  That's why I switched from Google, the !bang feature is something I could not live without now.
phreeza 15y ago
Incidentally, I switched my default search to ddg 2 days ago. Use !g a lot but also ddg native frequently. Starting to get a feel for what type of search will benefit more from DDGs extras.
reginaldo 15y ago
pg's analysis was spot on, then [1]. I recently realized DuckDuckGo would be a hit when a hacker friend who does not read HN started using DDG as his primary search engine. To me, this means it is out there. I switched too, at least for a while, and now I use both google and DDG, constantly having the impression that DDG's results are getting better and better. [1] http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
- anthuswilliams 15y ago
  I remember specifically thinking of DDG when PG mentioned search engines in that keynote. I've used DDG since 2010 and I would never switch back.
  - marcamillion 15y ago
    Although I don't use DDG, I too thought of them specifically when PG mentioned it. Let's see if PG turns out to be right on this one.
- rplnt 15y ago
  DDG used to be pushed heavily on reddit. Not in a bad way.
reitzensteinm 15y ago
Related discussion on the previous thread here, about a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3661345 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3661345
mrspeaker 15y ago
!g is the google killer. I switched to DDG, but kept drifting back to see if Google was doing better. I find myself using !g less and less, as I get used to the result format. At the moment, DDG reminds me of Firefox (or was it WaterSquirrel then?) back-in-the-day. Its something that "feels" better than what is the standard - and it's something that I go on and on about to other nerds, when I'm drunk ;)
- pierrebouchet 15y ago
  You've convinced me. I'm trying DDG right now!
- kylek 15y ago
  > (or was it WaterSquirrel then?) Phoenix -> FireBird -> FireFox :)
  - TylerE 15y ago
    He's probably thinking of "IceWeasel" which was a rebranded firefox a linux distro (Fedora maybe?) was shipping due to some sort of copyright/licensing quirk.
    - hkolek 15y ago
      it's debian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...
    - Wilduck 15y ago
      Debian actually. It's now GNU IceCat though. The reason they changed the name is because Debian backports some security features to Firefox, and Mozilla denies the use of the Firefox branding to unofficial builds of the software.
      - BCM43 15y ago
        It's now GNU IceCat though Are you sure? http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=icecat http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=...
Zirro 15y ago
I've been using DDG for quite a few months now and in general it works well. However I still find myself adding that "!g" at times when they find no results, and seeing what I was looking for at Google. I am also a bit disappointed with the "I'm feeling ducky"-results which are rarely what a person is likely to be looking for as soon as you get more complex than one word. But that's the negative parts, and otherwise the positive outweighs those by far. I love the bang-syntax and I found myself using their information-box directly on the search page very often, mostly for converting currency. I think better results will come with time and increasing usage, and I wish them good luck in the future.
orta 15y ago
It's interesting to see how many requests are coming from the API, offhand I can't think of any uses that I've come into contact with. Does anyone know who is using the API?
- prakash 15y ago
  Fastestfox, Cyberspace and others use our API: http://duckduckgo.com/api.html http://duckduckgo.com/api.html
stroboskop 15y ago
DuckDuckGo is definitely pulling users from Google. By mimicking Facebook, Google has lost its mojo. Stepped right into the "social" honeypot. No news. The more interesting thing is the fantastic feeling more and more people have: that Facebook and Google will take eachother down the spiral. As for the Google part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction, but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Especially if DuckDuckGo and other engines continue to get better while practicing their principles instead of a crude mixture of addictive search quality, addictedness to bucks and PR along the lines of "Don't be evil".
- coderdude 15y ago
  [1998] Google is definitely pulling users from Yahoo. By mimicking Alta Vista, Yahoo has lost its mojo. Stepped right into the "portal" honeypot. No news. The more interesting thing is the fantastic feeling more and more people have: that Alta Vista and Yahoo will take eachother down the spiral. As for the Yahoo part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction, but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Especially if Google and other engines continue to get better while practicing their principles instead of a crude mixture of addictive search quality, addictedness to bucks and PR along the lines of "Yahhooooo!".
  - hkolek 15y ago
    Haha. Reminds of the "The social graph is neither" article [1]. "Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90's. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet." [1] http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/ http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/
  - true_religion 15y ago
    One difference in this story is.... Google was vertically integrated from the start: They sent out their own bots to scan the internet, they had their own reverse index, and created their own algorithm. I'm not sure about DDGs backend---but if people use the g! tag, its almost as if DDG is simple chrome for Google. Maybe that'll be the future: Google will become the maker of engines, and let everyone else make the car.
wraith4000 15y ago
I swapped to DDG on all of my browsers about a month ago and I've been really pleased. Like others, I find myself occasionally using !g, particularly for programming queries. Things like !so, !mdn and !msdn actually help out a lot in some of these cases, which makes me think that as I learn the bangs I'll rely on Google less and less.
rbarooah 15y ago
Nice. If nothing else this proves that there is unmet demand in search.
- uriloran 15y ago
  It was mentioned before, but I think it's more a kind of "different" and unpersonalized search. Like proposed by Paul Graham: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
  - rbarooah 15y ago
    I agree. My point is simply that this is strong evidence that Google's 'one size fits all' approach leaves room for other entrants.
jimmyjim 15y ago
I've gotta say, Gabriel's tenacity is both admirable and inspirational. I remember long ago in its early days I tried it and shrugged it off as just another search engine, destined for failure after a few months of obscurity and being largely unknown. It's now my default browser, and has been as of about 2 weeks ago. Gabriel has been very keen on picking up where other search site are slacking.
JamesNapJr 15y ago
That's awesome! Just goes to show that search is still an area for growth.
buster 15y ago
For everyone finding DDG to slow, my last recommendation on this one.. startpage.com :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3662475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3662475 (just to make people aware of alternatives, before returning to google/bing/etc)
codesuela 15y ago
as a happy DDG user I have to say congrats and I absolutely love the zero click box, a feature that often provides superior search quality than Google.
rubberpants 15y ago
I've been using blekko.com and found that I prefer it to ddg. Like others have, I too go back to Google for programming related searches at times.
ekalvi 15y ago
That's consistent with our Google Analytics. Visits from DDG are up to 58 last week, up from 15 the first week in January with a steady climb. There was a dip last week over week for some reason. Compared to Google's 38K visits for last week, they have a long way to go to make a dent. We perform better in DDG results, as well.
tonfa 15y ago
Do they publish revenue? I wonder what the infrastructure costs are and how they scale in comparison to the number of request.
- rplnt 15y ago
  I think that most of their results come from Bing if I remember correctly. So the scaling doesn't have to be as heavy as it might seem. But I may be wrong.
dr_ 15y ago
As with most new search startups, people will give it a chance. Hence the increase in traffic. I tried it a couple of times but, as most people do, I then checked Google just to make sure I'd really covered what is considered the full spectrum of search.
- prakash 15y ago
  !g "search query" on DDG will do the search on google. Entire list here: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
spot 15y ago
So how is DuckDuckGo going to make money?
- itsprofitbaron 15y ago
  It's already monetizing via ads specifically, sponsored links which are highlighted in Yellow and are syndicated through Microsoft adCenter. They also take affiliate commission on sites like Amazon and eBay.
- stepeight 15y ago
  They have ads that are relevant to the search terms you just used.
buro9 15y ago
Does anyone know how much of that comes from Linux Mint? I dabbled with DDG a few times, but only when I changed to Mint did I start using it frequently. I've since wondered how much of a proportion of the traffic of DDG is because it's now the default search engine for Firefox in Mint.
thejteam 15y ago
My kids like the cute picture of the duck.
citricsquid 15y ago
I don't much like DuckDuckGo's results. For example a search for "Minecraft" via DuckDuckGo produces: #1 minecraft.net (official site) #2 facebook.com/minecraft #3 joystiq.com/game/minecraft (news blog) #4 minecraftportal.com (minecraft blog) #5 minecraft.en.softonic.com (a site distributing a copy of the phased out minecraft trial version) #6 minecraftwiki.net (official Minecraft wiki) #7 kotaku.com/minecraft/ (blog) The #1 result makes sense and is great, but why are the rest of the top results all blogs (besides the wiki)? It seems to heavily favour blogs. The official Minecraft forum isn't even in the top 20...
- xemoka 15y ago
  I'm not exactly sure what your talking about. The results for Google's minecraft search are pretty crummy too. #1 minecraft.net (can't tell from the search results if it's even the games real website, since there are ~.com, ~.net and ~.org sites all run by others) #2 minecraftforfree.com (a site distributing the full version for free?!) #3 minecraftwiki #4 wikipedia's article #5 pocket edition on the android app store, not even the actual website and no links to the iOS version? #6-10 youtube videos of people playing or reviewing minecraft #11 3 news links about minecraft #12-13 both link to googlemapsmania articles on minecraft maps. Oh and a nice link at the bottom about DMCA requested removal of a link (sent by Mojang at least). I imagine due to copyright/IP violations like link #2. YMMV though due to Google's search personalisation... The minecraft forum isn't listed until the second link on page 2. I'm not sure if you missed it but the forum is link #10 on the DDG search...
  - citricsquid 15y ago
    It was definitely ~#20 when I checked, it was below the page (I had to scroll then ctrl + f to make sure I found it) but now I can't even find it any more, the only thing I can find is "minecraftnews.net" which is around #30 and is a rip off of our site. Here is a screenshot of the results I see: http://i.imgur.com/qIc1J.png http://i.imgur.com/qIc1J.png I've visited google from a VM that has never used google before and I see: #1 minecraft.net #2 minecraftwiki.net #3 wikipedia.org/wiki/minecraft #4 Minecraft fan made trailer (video with ~8m views) #5 minecraft.org (fansite) #6 minecraftforum.net #7 Minecraft android app (official version of the game for android) #8 Minecraft on Facebook #9 IGN Minecraft review #10 Minecraft.com (a site capitalising on the domain but offering no Minecraft content) Google is certainly not perfect but they are a mile better than DuckDuckGo, which does not even include the official Minecraft forum which is linked from the wiki, from the official Minecraft site, from almost every Minecraft Youtube video... Wait I just did more "investigation", DuckDuckGo cares about capitalisation. What the hell? "Minecraft" and "minecraft" have different results and even the pages differ. Sometimes I can find minecraftforum.net listed for "Minecraft" (but not minecraft) and sometimes it just doesn't show at all. That's on typing in my search and refreshing; seconds apart and the results change.
pasbesoin 15y ago
One of National Public Radio's (NPR) shows -- "On the Media", perhaps -- had a several minute segment on Google's privacy changes and someone who decided to "divorce" themselves from Google. They mentioned DDG as the search engine they'd switched to and commented favorably on the experience. That's at least the second time in recent weeks that I've heard DDG mentioned on national or state public radio. It might sound... "incidental", but those kinds of exposures really get "the masses" to go and have a look. EDIT: Here's a reference to the "divorce" segment: http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/mar/23/divorcing-google/ http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/mar/23/divorcing-google/
epi0Bauqu 15y ago
Thank you all! (I'm the founder.) In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things we're working on are better programming queries (https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html -- one of my new favorites https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa) and speed. For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to know if anyone has noticed any difference over the past day or so. This change should equalize a lot of the location differences, which is the main issue. In some parts of the world we were way slower. Also, for anyone wanting to get involved we've been open sourcing more and more (https://github.com/duckduckgo https://github.com/duckduckgo). We're working on better entry points, but one could start here now: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki. For programming documentation in particular, this is the repo: https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead. That will answer queries like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl+split https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl+split On the back-end we could also use some sysadmin help :). Here's our hiring info: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216387 http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216387 Of course, we're also always looking for feedback, the more detailed/specific the better: https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html
- white_devil 15y ago
  Now that you have investors, they'll expect you to multiply DDG's worth. So how do you make money with it?
  - marshray 15y ago
    Screw that! Just keep giving me the service I love for free! Sorry, I know you need to make a living. :-) Just don't try to do it by leveraging my identity or trying my patience, please?
  - aidos 15y ago
    There are sponsored links - like on Google.
MitziMoto 15y ago
I just wish DDG could implement autocomplete/search suggestions. It's probably silly, but I've become as accustomed to typing a few letters into Google and it knowing exactly what I'm looking for as I have to tab complete in a unix terminal. I've also really become accustomed to "instant" search. And I'll be the first to admit I thought was a total gimmick when it was announced. Edit: After reading what I wrote, I realized it came off as if I didn't like DDG or didn't use it. Neither of those are true. I really like DDG and use it fairly often.
shepbook 15y ago
Long live the Hockey Stick!
JoelMcCracken 15y ago
I recently switched to using ddg for all of my searches. So far, I have been happy. I normally find what I am looking for within the first few results, and I find myself using !g less frequently. ddg certainly feels faster and less irritating than google. I have been very satisfied.
roadnottaken 15y ago
Nice to see such an important and modern project written in Perl, which people around here shit on all the time.
deleted 15y ago
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calncal 15y ago
Nice curve. March 1st caused me to go from DDG dabbler to browser default. Still use !g, but I find that I recommend DDG more often than I use !g.
sreyaNotfilc 15y ago
Awesome. I've heard of duckduckgo from a coworker and use it regularly. I'm creating an art site and have a search feature. I made sure to include duckduckgo along with google, and bing as search providers. It only makes sense, right?
toomanysecrets 15y ago
I love using DDG through the Tor network. http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion
pnathan 15y ago
I use DDG a lot. The reality is, it's not as tuned a search engine as Google is. However, I find it to be a more serendipitous search engine. It's better in breadth than G, IMO. That is to say, the top hit on Google is more precise if I want a specific thing, but the breadth of results on DDG is much more useful than Google in general. As a matter of fact, it reminds me of the '90s, where a search could teach you more than just the one thing you were looking for. I like it... most of the time. :-)
xpose2000 15y ago
It's great to hear that DDG is doing well. The problem is that I will never switch over to it due to its shortcomings compared to Google and even Bing. I tried to give it a go for a day or so, but quickly realized the results being returned were not good enough. 1) It's not as accurate as Google. Sometimes DDG might return a better result (such as https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa), but 9/10 times Google is much more accurate. 2) DDG is playing catchup to a search engine that has hundreds of employees and a 10+ year head start. The types of queries DDG is trying to solve now were likely solved years ago and have been finely tuned numerous times. 3) I think this good video http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-quality-meeting-uncut.html http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-qualit... about sums up the type of problems they are solving now and how advanced their platform is. Google is tweaking an edge-case scenario that is only .1% of their traffic. That is more traffic than all of DDG. 4) If DDG is all about respecting privacy and not tracking users, then use Google or Bing in incognito mode. Problem solved. I'm not trying to be negative, but all signs point to a losing battle.
- jlarocco 15y ago
  As a counterexample for number one, I've found DDG to be as good or better than Google on almost everything. The only place Google really beats it is in mailing list archives. DDG doesn't seem to crawl sites like gmane. Numbers two and three don't make any sense to me as reasons not to use DDG. Using those criteria nobody would have switched to Google because they were just some college guys, while AltaVista and Yahoo have a big head start and huge departments working on search... Number four is simply too inconvenient. I could go through the trouble of switching to incognito mode every time I needed to search, or I could just use DDG.
  - xpose2000 15y ago
    The difference now is that Google is constantly trying to improve now more than ever, whereas before the search engines thought it was "good enough". AltaVista and Yahoo were stuck in the technology of the day. The guys at Google had a crazy idea to implement "pagerank" and turn everything upside down. I switched to Google because it was more accurate, and for no reason other than that. That's my #1 priority. Fast forward to today and DDG is not trying to solve an accuracy or crawling problem. I'm not really sure what problem they are trying to solve other than to be an alternative search. There is nothing wrong with that, but I just don't think it fits me.
zbuc 15y ago
I like the concept of DDG but unfortunately the results just aren't there yet... Look at the search results for "Google Verbatim Mode" on DDG vs Google. On Google, all results are actually about the "Verbatim" search mode on Google. We even get results like "How to set Verbatim mode as default on Google Chrome" with actual instructions. On DDG, we instead get a really crappy blog article as the first result, and some unrelated junk about Google Earth DirectX and Windows 8. There's one result that asks the question most people searching for that query would want answered, "I would like to be able to use verbatim mode as standard". However... it's a link to a newsgroup posting with no answers, unlike the Google results which actually provided links to blog postings with the answer. So, I'm going to use Verbatim mode on Google for now, now that I know how to activate it by default... Let me know if you guys work these issues out, I'd love to use DDG, but it's just not returning valuable results reliably yet.
littlemerman 15y ago
Congrats!
mladenkovacevic 15y ago
Pretty damn good. I love how the search engine itself helps you find a better context to frame your search into. It's like having a conversation with the website (instead of it assuming I want something because I searched for it before and it's "most likely" I was looking for this)
nextstep 15y ago
I love DuckDuckGo. My only real complaint is when their search falls back on Google (for maps, and things like that). It would be great if DDG were able to start providing their own alternative image/map searches. I would probably switch to them fulltime.
dusklight 15y ago
I just want to say I use duckduckgo, but the reason is because I find Google's recent policies to be unsupportable and I no longer want to use them. So far duckduckgo has been inferior in just about every way to google, most notably search speed and search quality. Also I have seen some extremely dubious scammy ads in ddg, which make me uncomfortable for sure.
tomelders 15y ago
I've tried hacking the Safari Binary using the online instructions to make DDG my default search (GLIMS sucks), but I can't get it working at all. I can't find the lines that I'm meant to be replacing. Has anyone else had any luck?
eurohacker 15y ago
about a year ago i checked my niche site and you still have the same results, my niche word is no 1 on both Google and Duck , while google places my website first for the given niche word , then Duck places my facebook page first and my actual website as a second result - which seems odd, especially because the website has few fans
eurohacker 15y ago
about a year ago i checked my niche site and you still have the same results, my niche word is no 1 on both Google and Duck , while google places my website first for the given niche word , then Duck places my facebook page first and my actual website as a second result - which seems odd, especially because the website has few facebook fans
jccodez 15y ago
Glad to hear. Been using it more of late.
RLG_RLG 15y ago
Thanks for this! I was finally fed up with goCIAoglNSAe.cFBIom
nsomaru 15y ago
hurry up and get some servers in India.
akavlie 15y ago
I tried to switch to DDG recently; after a couple of weeks using it as my default search engine in Chrome, I had to switch back to Google. Speed was a pretty big factor, but more than that, the search results just didn't compare. Still, I'm rooting for them, and hope that they're able to close the gap, both in speed and results. I love their style, and all of the site-specific search shortcuts.
cromwellian 15y ago
DDG: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+movie+where+evil+is+in+a+toaster+oven http://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+movie+where+evil+is+in+a+toaste... Time Bandits is #8 vs https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=the+movie+where+evil+is+in+a+toaster+oven https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=the+mo... First hit. I realize it is in fashion to make bold claims that somehow Google destroyed its search in a monomaniacal pursuit of social, but a hyperbolic if not patently untrue story. Yes, the user interface has changed and gotten fancier and more cluttered with the introduction of toolbar and sidebar (that's been happening over years, prior to G+), but the actual organic results have not changed much at all except to improve on average, even if you take into account Search Plus Your World (which you can disable) Shocking, but most people at Google do not work on G+, it is not the sole focus of the company, and the narrative that Google is simply dropping everything else to mindlessly chase Facebook is blogosphere fiction. There are over 30,000 employees and I would be surprised if even 2% of them worked on G+. Teams at Google are typically small and at any given time, people are working on a large number of projects. It's simply not Google's culture to mindlessly focus on a single unproven product to the detriment of others. If anything, Google is frequently criticized for doing too many new things at once, and that's what you get when you have a company run with engineering culture. Google makes most of their money from Search and Ads. You can bet that they watch data from search quality and marketshare like a hawk, and if social was causing Google search to suck more and lose customers, you can bet they'd turn it off in a heartbeat. It's been said by some analysts that every 1% loss in search marketshare is $1 billion in revenue. Facebook isn't making that much money, and so from a cost-benefit analysis, sacrificing billions in search share revenue to try and gain social-search revenue doesn't sound rational. It would thus be reasonable to assume, that any changes Google actually makes to core search are a) conservative b) subjected to a battery of scientific tests and c) as low risk as they can make them to their core business. But the way you read things in the Blogosphere, Search has been radically altered. The evidence just isn't there.
- krelian 15y ago
  It's very common these days to take many amazing products for granted. Google search is an amazing tool that suffers a lot from very vocal complaints and not enough praise. The only areas it is lacking in are those that are heavily targeted by spammers.
wastedbrains 15y ago
Hooray I like DDG and switched awhile ago making it my default search. Congrats.
thecombjelly 15y ago
I don't really understand why so many people think that the results on DDG are worse than Google. Maybe I just don't search for things that other people do, or I search differently, but for me, I usually prefer the DDG results. Most of it has to do with the zero click info and the disambiguation. Especially the disambiguation. I get better results because most things I search for could be disambiguated, and I take full advantage of that to quickly give me just the results related to what I'm looking for.
wilfra 15y ago
Google has been annoying me lately. I'm willing to give this a shot. Good luck DDG. Resetting Chrome default search engine now.
nullflux 15y ago
The thing that worries me about DDG is their reliance on others' search engines. If there was ever a true defection from one of the big guys' services to DDG (i.e., if DDG was actually blowing up), it seems to me they'd just replicate many of DDG's features for their userbase and DDG would wither, or even just pull DDG's access to their search engines.
ph33r 15y ago
Last week I was searching for a: Sabian 18" HHX Chinese cymbal. I was considering buying one for my kit and wanted to see some reviews, video samples, prices etc. DuckDuckGo: The top there results were American Ebay search results (I live in Canada), a drum shop in Memphis (15 hour drive), and various other online stores (discountdrumequipment.info). Google: The first page of results had links to the official Sabian product pages, Youtube videos of people playing it, and the most impressive thing was a 3 day old Kijiji ad (again, I live in Canada) with the exact cymbal I wanted for a good price in a city just 45 minutes from me. I responded to the ad, drove the 45 minutes, and purchased it. DuckDuckGo's stance on user privacy is admirable, but Google still gets my vote... it's accuracy still impresses me.
Craiggybear 15y ago
Treading carefully here ... I love DDG and find it yields far more useful results than anything else. Besides, I like not getting tracked all the time and I can switch off ads without needing any extensions. That in my view is a very civilised set of options and the rest of the Internet should follow by example.
yuletide666 15y ago
Chrome autocomplete support would be awesome.
tswartz 15y ago
Yes, I've noticed an increase in speed over the last couple of days. Keep up the good work!
visarg 15y ago
I like their attitude, but... it needs more speed and better results, though using Bing as a source this might not be possible. The lack of image, news and video search is a problem too. Actually, I use quite often book search, scholar and maps too. In order to be a complete search solution, you need more than web search today.
eru 15y ago
It would be nice to see those graphs with a logarithmic y-axis.
radge 15y ago
I really wish I could use DDG on iOS then I could fully replace google.
zmmmmm 15y ago
Have been using DDG for the last 2 months but have to admit I'm feeling withdrawal symptoms, mainly due to speed. I hope that the increase in traffic is mainly responsible for things being a bit slow - the sluggishness (NOT results) is the primary thing making me yearn for Google at the moment.
theDaveB 15y ago
I can't seem to get DDG to show me UK results, although I have set my preferences to UK. Still shows amazon.com when searching for products etc... Search for the same thing on google.co.uk and it always shows me .co.uk sites. I tend to use DDG as my first choice and only switch to google if I can't find something. Dave
leojg 15y ago
I started to use it about a couple of weeks ago
duncanj 15y ago
Give me a quick (or configurable, or special URL) that includes a "search on Google Scholar" link and I will switch from Google. Ever since Google's visual refresh that removed the menu item for search on google scholar, I've lost one of my timesavers.
whackberry 15y ago
Hi, I've only been using DuckDuckGo lately and I love it. Search quality is so impressive and the respect for privacy is very welcome. I hope it is able to maintain this independent feel and not sell out like others did.
nl 15y ago
Wed 28-Mar-2012 1,518,581 direct 9,580,029 api 225,161 bot Am I reading this right? DDG does ~6 times as much traffic in API requests compared to search requests? That makes a pretty significant difference to the monetisation strategy!
- jeltz 15y ago
  Note though that the growth of direct requests is much faster than the growth of API requests.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
kirillzubovsky 15y ago
Did you know Duck.com redirects to Google.com? That's pretty smart of Google. In other thoughts, congratulations on the exploding growth!
hm2k 15y ago
Tip: Use the short URL ddg.gg for less typing.
fotonobile 15y ago
You are #1 for programming related queries. I am curious about seeing you build up the similar precision/recall for other areas.
ExxKA 15y ago
Nice! You guys deserve it
pferde 15y ago
Careful with the headline, I'm sure it caused some terrorist alert bells to ring in som US three-letter agency. :)
snowpolar 15y ago
I feel part of it's sudden huge growth has to do with udacity search engine course.
shaggy 15y ago
It's very exciting to see usage of DDG increasing and the service getting more and more recognition. I've been using DDG for almost two years now and love the service. The privacy is what drew me in, but the goodies are what made me a user for life. It's the default for my browser and I use the iPhone and iPad apps regularly. Keep up the good work DDG! I'd be happy to lend my sysadmin skills to help :)
Darraghb 15y ago
Great to see DDG gaining traction. However, I switched my Chrome search to DDG last year and the one thing that I realised I couldn't live without was maps. I didn't realise how often I must search for an address and to have location appear in search makes life so much easier. If you guys integrated with Openstreetmap, I'd switch back in an instant!
- GFischer 15y ago
  I'm a heavy Google Maps user as well. OSM integration would be nice, but I've found that DDG still has slightly inferior results to Google. I do like the approach to privacy and occasionaly use it :)
FredBrach 15y ago
I'm using DuckDuckGo since two days now as default everything (since I've read this thread) and my surprise is that I've not switch back to google yet. Hey that's awesome since I'm not specially an early adopter statistically. Btw, I particularly like the insight box.
asymmetric 15y ago
congrats. i stopped using google after their last policy change. DDG mostly fits the bill, apart from some special cases.
tete 15y ago
The only thing that's missing from DDG taking over the world is good i18n. Really, it's the only thing that ever made it impossible for me to recommend it. A lot of especially older people outside the US use Google mainly because they don't or can't care for the rest of the world and simply don't have the required English skills. This isn't just about the interface language and search results, but also about !bangs. To be useable !ebay has to use the the already available region setting. Other than that I have been an advocate from the early days, because DDG is what the world needs.
joeblau 15y ago
I've been using this search engine for a week and I really like it. The only thing I've noticed is that Google has conditioned me to never look at the top section because that's where sponsored ad's are so I have to force myself to click on the top link. Brainwashed by GOOG :)
mbtforshoes 15y ago
http://www.mbtforshoes.com/ http://www.mbtforshoes.com/ good shoes

1221 points by MatthewPhillips 15y ago

I've been using DuckDuckGo more and more lately since google added a redirect[1] for any link clicked in their search results a couple months ago. I'm in China and most links I click on google don't load. Perhaps because China is messing with DNS queries to google.com and trying to limit the amount of data they collect on their citizens. [1] The google link for duckduckgo search result first hits this link, and this is where the pageload errors occur: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F&ei=xR91T-muMcKhiQfN09GXDw&usg=AFQjCNH5TNBuuoMvRfveNpZRVgyl05DMEw http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

Gobitron 15y ago

That's a fantastic looking curve, but keep in mind the absolute numbers shown. They are at 1.6 million direct queries per day. Still a ways to go to be truly competitive (3 billion per day for Google). Still, if they keep up with current growth rates, they could do some real damage.

joshmlewis 15y ago
Just one at a time is all it takes. :) Replace starfish with searches..and bend your imagination a bit. "A man was walking along a deserted beach at sunset. As he walked he could see a young boy in the distance, as he drew nearer he noticed that the boy kept bending down, picking something up and throwing it into the water. Time and again he kept hurling things into the ocean. As the man approached even closer, he was able to see that the boy was picking up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at a time he was throwing them back into the water. The man asked the boy what he was doing, the boy replied,"I am throwing these washed up starfish back into the ocean, or else they will die through lack of oxygen. "But", said the man, "You can't possibly save them all, there are thousands on this beach, and this must be happening on hundreds of beaches along the coast. You can't possibly make a difference." The boy looked down, frowning for a moment; then bent down to pick up another starfish, smiling as he threw it back into the sea. He replied, "I made a huge difference to that one!""

mise 15y ago

I certainly felt some difficulty first in setting Duck Duck Go as my default search engine. Google trains you repeatedly, implicitly, over the years on how to optimise your query for Google. I often still find myself adding "!g" to my DDG query to perform the search on Google, but at least Google isn't my first point of contact any more.

PaulHoule 15y ago

if i get that right, people are doing a lot more API calls than direct searches... Which begs the questions of (i) who they are, (ii) what they're doing, and (iii) how this can be monetized?

muyuu 15y ago
The graph is for direct searches though. You can see API calls stable at around 9M for quite a while, and direct searches have sky-rocketed. You're right that there are a lot more API calls still (~x6). But the gap is closing quickly.
derda 15y ago
Maybe these numbers include search requests from browser-search fields and similar. Otherwise I would be very interested in those sources, too.
prakash 15y ago
Fastestfox, Cyberspace and others use our API: http://duckduckgo.com/api.html http://duckduckgo.com/api.html Would love to hear ideas on (iii).

TeeWEE 15y ago

I use duckduckgo as my default search engine now. If i need some more info i just use g!. Really like the bang syntax! And its doesnt track all my stuff, and this stupid google+ (failure) is not integrated. I just want to search stuff. Google did it right in the past, now duck duck go is my uberlord.

jstalin 15y ago

I <3 DDG.

geoffw8 15y ago

Wow, thats a great curve. Just wanted to throw in my personal experience with DuckDuckGo, and it doesn't necessarily reflect on DuckDuckGo specifically, however: After seeing them pop up here once or twice quite recently I thought I'd give it a go, I opened up preferences in Chrome and switched my default search over to DDG. It felt good, made a nice change but was certainly a bit "odd". I found what I wanted, most of the time albeit it with a slight drop in quality vs Google. But my biggest gripe with them was confidence. I'd just started out at a new job as a programmer and as you can imagine, I was searching for a good few things, usually things I was struggling with and I just didn't feel sure that I was getting the best results I possibly could be. You might think thats totally crazy, but when your battling an issue as many of you know, you want more than anything to work out whats going on. I didn't have any margin for error, I wanted the best results right there that second. Specifics aside, knowing that Google is far superior in their results makes it real difficult to use another search engine really, extra features (!so etc) or no extra features. I personally search because I need to "find" something and I usually don't know where that something is, opening up Stack Overflow isn't that much of a chore for me. Its the other bit I need help with. Anyway, I commend their mission and hope they succeed in taking a fair slice of the market. I think he's a great entrepreneur and I wish him the best of luck. I can't imagine what it must be like to be head on with... Google.

pubby 15y ago
I generally stick to Google for programming related searches and use DDG for the rest. Hopefully DDG improves to the point where I can use it 100% of the time.
- aidos 15y ago
  Interestingly I switched to DDG because I was having to quote too many programming terms in Google. All of them sometimes, just to stop Google from autocorrecting. I still have 'g' wired as my omnibar shortcut for Google though as I don't always find what I'm looking for on DDG.
  - gala8y 15y ago

spodek 15y ago

People care about privacy and not being tracked. I predict Google's arms race with Facebook to profit more from user's data will augment this growth. And/or dampen that arms race. That's why I search with DuckDuckGo by default (previously Scroogle).

jackery 15y ago
With everyone's concern with privacy, I'm surprised Ask Eraser isn't mentioned more frequently (http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/about/askeraser.shtml http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/about/askeraser.shtml).
- chaostheory 15y ago
  I used to use Ask until they made an announcement that they were leaving the search business and staying in the toolbar sector. I'm surprised they're still up.
RichClaxton 15y ago
That's why I switched from Google, the !bang feature is something I could not live without now.

phreeza 15y ago

Incidentally, I switched my default search to ddg 2 days ago. Use !g a lot but also ddg native frequently. Starting to get a feel for what type of search will benefit more from DDGs extras.

reginaldo 15y ago

pg's analysis was spot on, then [1]. I recently realized DuckDuckGo would be a hit when a hacker friend who does not read HN started using DDG as his primary search engine. To me, this means it is out there. I switched too, at least for a while, and now I use both google and DDG, constantly having the impression that DDG's results are getting better and better. [1] http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

anthuswilliams 15y ago
I remember specifically thinking of DDG when PG mentioned search engines in that keynote. I've used DDG since 2010 and I would never switch back.
- marcamillion 15y ago
  Although I don't use DDG, I too thought of them specifically when PG mentioned it. Let's see if PG turns out to be right on this one.
rplnt 15y ago
DDG used to be pushed heavily on reddit. Not in a bad way.

reitzensteinm 15y ago

Related discussion on the previous thread here, about a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3661345 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3661345

mrspeaker 15y ago

!g is the google killer. I switched to DDG, but kept drifting back to see if Google was doing better. I find myself using !g less and less, as I get used to the result format. At the moment, DDG reminds me of Firefox (or was it WaterSquirrel then?) back-in-the-day. Its something that "feels" better than what is the standard - and it's something that I go on and on about to other nerds, when I'm drunk ;)

pierrebouchet 15y ago
You've convinced me. I'm trying DDG right now!
kylek 15y ago
> (or was it WaterSquirrel then?) Phoenix -> FireBird -> FireFox :)
- TylerE 15y ago
  He's probably thinking of "IceWeasel" which was a rebranded firefox a linux distro (Fedora maybe?) was shipping due to some sort of copyright/licensing quirk.
  - hkolek 15y ago
    it's debian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...
  - Wilduck 15y ago
    Debian actually. It's now GNU IceCat though. The reason they changed the name is because Debian backports some security features to Firefox, and Mozilla denies the use of the Firefox branding to unofficial builds of the software.
    - BCM43 15y ago
      It's now GNU IceCat though Are you sure? http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=icecat http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=...

Zirro 15y ago

I've been using DDG for quite a few months now and in general it works well. However I still find myself adding that "!g" at times when they find no results, and seeing what I was looking for at Google. I am also a bit disappointed with the "I'm feeling ducky"-results which are rarely what a person is likely to be looking for as soon as you get more complex than one word. But that's the negative parts, and otherwise the positive outweighs those by far. I love the bang-syntax and I found myself using their information-box directly on the search page very often, mostly for converting currency. I think better results will come with time and increasing usage, and I wish them good luck in the future.

orta 15y ago

It's interesting to see how many requests are coming from the API, offhand I can't think of any uses that I've come into contact with. Does anyone know who is using the API?

prakash 15y ago
Fastestfox, Cyberspace and others use our API: http://duckduckgo.com/api.html http://duckduckgo.com/api.html

stroboskop 15y ago

DuckDuckGo is definitely pulling users from Google. By mimicking Facebook, Google has lost its mojo. Stepped right into the "social" honeypot. No news. The more interesting thing is the fantastic feeling more and more people have: that Facebook and Google will take eachother down the spiral. As for the Google part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction, but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Especially if DuckDuckGo and other engines continue to get better while practicing their principles instead of a crude mixture of addictive search quality, addictedness to bucks and PR along the lines of "Don't be evil".

coderdude 15y ago
[1998] Google is definitely pulling users from Yahoo. By mimicking Alta Vista, Yahoo has lost its mojo. Stepped right into the "portal" honeypot. No news. The more interesting thing is the fantastic feeling more and more people have: that Alta Vista and Yahoo will take eachother down the spiral. As for the Yahoo part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction, but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Especially if Google and other engines continue to get better while practicing their principles instead of a crude mixture of addictive search quality, addictedness to bucks and PR along the lines of "Yahhooooo!".
- hkolek 15y ago
  Haha. Reminds of the "The social graph is neither" article [1]. "Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90's. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet." [1] http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/ http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/
- true_religion 15y ago
  One difference in this story is.... Google was vertically integrated from the start: They sent out their own bots to scan the internet, they had their own reverse index, and created their own algorithm. I'm not sure about DDGs backend---but if people use the g! tag, its almost as if DDG is simple chrome for Google. Maybe that'll be the future: Google will become the maker of engines, and let everyone else make the car.

wraith4000 15y ago

I swapped to DDG on all of my browsers about a month ago and I've been really pleased. Like others, I find myself occasionally using !g, particularly for programming queries. Things like !so, !mdn and !msdn actually help out a lot in some of these cases, which makes me think that as I learn the bangs I'll rely on Google less and less.

rbarooah 15y ago

Nice. If nothing else this proves that there is unmet demand in search.

uriloran 15y ago
It was mentioned before, but I think it's more a kind of "different" and unpersonalized search. Like proposed by Paul Graham: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
- rbarooah 15y ago
  I agree. My point is simply that this is strong evidence that Google's 'one size fits all' approach leaves room for other entrants.

jimmyjim 15y ago

I've gotta say, Gabriel's tenacity is both admirable and inspirational. I remember long ago in its early days I tried it and shrugged it off as just another search engine, destined for failure after a few months of obscurity and being largely unknown. It's now my default browser, and has been as of about 2 weeks ago. Gabriel has been very keen on picking up where other search site are slacking.

JamesNapJr 15y ago

That's awesome! Just goes to show that search is still an area for growth.

buster 15y ago

For everyone finding DDG to slow, my last recommendation on this one.. startpage.com :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3662475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3662475 (just to make people aware of alternatives, before returning to google/bing/etc)

codesuela 15y ago

as a happy DDG user I have to say congrats and I absolutely love the zero click box, a feature that often provides superior search quality than Google.

rubberpants 15y ago

I've been using blekko.com and found that I prefer it to ddg. Like others have, I too go back to Google for programming related searches at times.

ekalvi 15y ago

That's consistent with our Google Analytics. Visits from DDG are up to 58 last week, up from 15 the first week in January with a steady climb. There was a dip last week over week for some reason. Compared to Google's 38K visits for last week, they have a long way to go to make a dent. We perform better in DDG results, as well.

tonfa 15y ago

Do they publish revenue? I wonder what the infrastructure costs are and how they scale in comparison to the number of request.

rplnt 15y ago
I think that most of their results come from Bing if I remember correctly. So the scaling doesn't have to be as heavy as it might seem. But I may be wrong.

dr_ 15y ago

As with most new search startups, people will give it a chance. Hence the increase in traffic. I tried it a couple of times but, as most people do, I then checked Google just to make sure I'd really covered what is considered the full spectrum of search.

prakash 15y ago
!g "search query" on DDG will do the search on google. Entire list here: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

spot 15y ago

So how is DuckDuckGo going to make money?

itsprofitbaron 15y ago
It's already monetizing via ads specifically, sponsored links which are highlighted in Yellow and are syndicated through Microsoft adCenter. They also take affiliate commission on sites like Amazon and eBay.
stepeight 15y ago
They have ads that are relevant to the search terms you just used.

buro9 15y ago

Does anyone know how much of that comes from Linux Mint? I dabbled with DDG a few times, but only when I changed to Mint did I start using it frequently. I've since wondered how much of a proportion of the traffic of DDG is because it's now the default search engine for Firefox in Mint.

thejteam 15y ago

My kids like the cute picture of the duck.

citricsquid 15y ago

I don't much like DuckDuckGo's results. For example a search for "Minecraft" via DuckDuckGo produces: #1 minecraft.net (official site) #2 facebook.com/minecraft #3 joystiq.com/game/minecraft (news blog) #4 minecraftportal.com (minecraft blog) #5 minecraft.en.softonic.com (a site distributing a copy of the phased out minecraft trial version) #6 minecraftwiki.net (official Minecraft wiki) #7 kotaku.com/minecraft/ (blog) The #1 result makes sense and is great, but why are the rest of the top results all blogs (besides the wiki)? It seems to heavily favour blogs. The official Minecraft forum isn't even in the top 20...

xemoka 15y ago
I'm not exactly sure what your talking about. The results for Google's minecraft search are pretty crummy too. #1 minecraft.net (can't tell from the search results if it's even the games real website, since there are ~.com, ~.net and ~.org sites all run by others) #2 minecraftforfree.com (a site distributing the full version for free?!) #3 minecraftwiki #4 wikipedia's article #5 pocket edition on the android app store, not even the actual website and no links to the iOS version? #6-10 youtube videos of people playing or reviewing minecraft #11 3 news links about minecraft #12-13 both link to googlemapsmania articles on minecraft maps. Oh and a nice link at the bottom about DMCA requested removal of a link (sent by Mojang at least). I imagine due to copyright/IP violations like link #2. YMMV though due to Google's search personalisation... The minecraft forum isn't listed until the second link on page 2. I'm not sure if you missed it but the forum is link #10 on the DDG search...
- citricsquid 15y ago
  It was definitely ~#20 when I checked, it was below the page (I had to scroll then ctrl + f to make sure I found it) but now I can't even find it any more, the only thing I can find is "minecraftnews.net" which is around #30 and is a rip off of our site. Here is a screenshot of the results I see: http://i.imgur.com/qIc1J.png http://i.imgur.com/qIc1J.png I've visited google from a VM that has never used google before and I see: #1 minecraft.net #2 minecraftwiki.net #3 wikipedia.org/wiki/minecraft #4 Minecraft fan made trailer (video with ~8m views) #5 minecraft.org (fansite) #6 minecraftforum.net #7 Minecraft android app (official version of the game for android) #8 Minecraft on Facebook #9 IGN Minecraft review #10 Minecraft.com (a site capitalising on the domain but offering no Minecraft content) Google is certainly not perfect but they are a mile better than DuckDuckGo, which does not even include the official Minecraft forum which is linked from the wiki, from the official Minecraft site, from almost every Minecraft Youtube video... Wait I just did more "investigation", DuckDuckGo cares about capitalisation. What the hell? "Minecraft" and "minecraft" have different results and even the pages differ. Sometimes I can find minecraftforum.net listed for "Minecraft" (but not minecraft) and sometimes it just doesn't show at all. That's on typing in my search and refreshing; seconds apart and the results change.

pasbesoin 15y ago

One of National Public Radio's (NPR) shows -- "On the Media", perhaps -- had a several minute segment on Google's privacy changes and someone who decided to "divorce" themselves from Google. They mentioned DDG as the search engine they'd switched to and commented favorably on the experience. That's at least the second time in recent weeks that I've heard DDG mentioned on national or state public radio. It might sound... "incidental", but those kinds of exposures really get "the masses" to go and have a look. EDIT: Here's a reference to the "divorce" segment: http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/mar/23/divorcing-google/ http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/mar/23/divorcing-google/

epi0Bauqu 15y ago

Thank you all! (I'm the founder.) In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things we're working on are better programming queries (https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html -- one of my new favorites https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa) and speed. For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to know if anyone has noticed any difference over the past day or so. This change should equalize a lot of the location differences, which is the main issue. In some parts of the world we were way slower. Also, for anyone wanting to get involved we've been open sourcing more and more (https://github.com/duckduckgo https://github.com/duckduckgo). We're working on better entry points, but one could start here now: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki. For programming documentation in particular, this is the repo: https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead. That will answer queries like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl+split https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl+split On the back-end we could also use some sysadmin help :). Here's our hiring info: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216387 http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216387 Of course, we're also always looking for feedback, the more detailed/specific the better: https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html

white_devil 15y ago
Now that you have investors, they'll expect you to multiply DDG's worth. So how do you make money with it?
- marshray 15y ago
  Screw that! Just keep giving me the service I love for free! Sorry, I know you need to make a living. :-) Just don't try to do it by leveraging my identity or trying my patience, please?
- aidos 15y ago
  There are sponsored links - like on Google.

MitziMoto 15y ago

I just wish DDG could implement autocomplete/search suggestions. It's probably silly, but I've become as accustomed to typing a few letters into Google and it knowing exactly what I'm looking for as I have to tab complete in a unix terminal. I've also really become accustomed to "instant" search. And I'll be the first to admit I thought was a total gimmick when it was announced. Edit: After reading what I wrote, I realized it came off as if I didn't like DDG or didn't use it. Neither of those are true. I really like DDG and use it fairly often.

shepbook 15y ago

Long live the Hockey Stick!

JoelMcCracken 15y ago

I recently switched to using ddg for all of my searches. So far, I have been happy. I normally find what I am looking for within the first few results, and I find myself using !g less frequently. ddg certainly feels faster and less irritating than google. I have been very satisfied.

roadnottaken 15y ago

Nice to see such an important and modern project written in Perl, which people around here shit on all the time.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

calncal 15y ago

Nice curve. March 1st caused me to go from DDG dabbler to browser default. Still use !g, but I find that I recommend DDG more often than I use !g.

sreyaNotfilc 15y ago

Awesome. I've heard of duckduckgo from a coworker and use it regularly. I'm creating an art site and have a search feature. I made sure to include duckduckgo along with google, and bing as search providers. It only makes sense, right?

toomanysecrets 15y ago

I love using DDG through the Tor network. http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion

pnathan 15y ago

I use DDG a lot. The reality is, it's not as tuned a search engine as Google is. However, I find it to be a more serendipitous search engine. It's better in breadth than G, IMO. That is to say, the top hit on Google is more precise if I want a specific thing, but the breadth of results on DDG is much more useful than Google in general. As a matter of fact, it reminds me of the '90s, where a search could teach you more than just the one thing you were looking for. I like it... most of the time. :-)

xpose2000 15y ago

It's great to hear that DDG is doing well. The problem is that I will never switch over to it due to its shortcomings compared to Google and even Bing. I tried to give it a go for a day or so, but quickly realized the results being returned were not good enough. 1) It's not as accurate as Google. Sometimes DDG might return a better result (such as https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa), but 9/10 times Google is much more accurate. 2) DDG is playing catchup to a search engine that has hundreds of employees and a 10+ year head start. The types of queries DDG is trying to solve now were likely solved years ago and have been finely tuned numerous times. 3) I think this good video http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-quality-meeting-uncut.html http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-qualit... about sums up the type of problems they are solving now and how advanced their platform is. Google is tweaking an edge-case scenario that is only .1% of their traffic. That is more traffic than all of DDG. 4) If DDG is all about respecting privacy and not tracking users, then use Google or Bing in incognito mode. Problem solved. I'm not trying to be negative, but all signs point to a losing battle.

jlarocco 15y ago
As a counterexample for number one, I've found DDG to be as good or better than Google on almost everything. The only place Google really beats it is in mailing list archives. DDG doesn't seem to crawl sites like gmane. Numbers two and three don't make any sense to me as reasons not to use DDG. Using those criteria nobody would have switched to Google because they were just some college guys, while AltaVista and Yahoo have a big head start and huge departments working on search... Number four is simply too inconvenient. I could go through the trouble of switching to incognito mode every time I needed to search, or I could just use DDG.
- xpose2000 15y ago
  The difference now is that Google is constantly trying to improve now more than ever, whereas before the search engines thought it was "good enough". AltaVista and Yahoo were stuck in the technology of the day. The guys at Google had a crazy idea to implement "pagerank" and turn everything upside down. I switched to Google because it was more accurate, and for no reason other than that. That's my #1 priority. Fast forward to today and DDG is not trying to solve an accuracy or crawling problem. I'm not really sure what problem they are trying to solve other than to be an alternative search. There is nothing wrong with that, but I just don't think it fits me.

zbuc 15y ago

I like the concept of DDG but unfortunately the results just aren't there yet... Look at the search results for "Google Verbatim Mode" on DDG vs Google. On Google, all results are actually about the "Verbatim" search mode on Google. We even get results like "How to set Verbatim mode as default on Google Chrome" with actual instructions. On DDG, we instead get a really crappy blog article as the first result, and some unrelated junk about Google Earth DirectX and Windows 8. There's one result that asks the question most people searching for that query would want answered, "I would like to be able to use verbatim mode as standard". However... it's a link to a newsgroup posting with no answers, unlike the Google results which actually provided links to blog postings with the answer. So, I'm going to use Verbatim mode on Google for now, now that I know how to activate it by default... Let me know if you guys work these issues out, I'd love to use DDG, but it's just not returning valuable results reliably yet.

littlemerman 15y ago

Congrats!

mladenkovacevic 15y ago

Pretty damn good. I love how the search engine itself helps you find a better context to frame your search into. It's like having a conversation with the website (instead of it assuming I want something because I searched for it before and it's "most likely" I was looking for this)

nextstep 15y ago

I love DuckDuckGo. My only real complaint is when their search falls back on Google (for maps, and things like that). It would be great if DDG were able to start providing their own alternative image/map searches. I would probably switch to them fulltime.

dusklight 15y ago

I just want to say I use duckduckgo, but the reason is because I find Google's recent policies to be unsupportable and I no longer want to use them. So far duckduckgo has been inferior in just about every way to google, most notably search speed and search quality. Also I have seen some extremely dubious scammy ads in ddg, which make me uncomfortable for sure.

tomelders 15y ago

I've tried hacking the Safari Binary using the online instructions to make DDG my default search (GLIMS sucks), but I can't get it working at all. I can't find the lines that I'm meant to be replacing. Has anyone else had any luck?

eurohacker 15y ago

about a year ago i checked my niche site and you still have the same results, my niche word is no 1 on both Google and Duck , while google places my website first for the given niche word , then Duck places my facebook page first and my actual website as a second result - which seems odd, especially because the website has few fans

eurohacker 15y ago

jccodez 15y ago

Glad to hear. Been using it more of late.

RLG_RLG 15y ago

Thanks for this! I was finally fed up with goCIAoglNSAe.cFBIom

nsomaru 15y ago

hurry up and get some servers in India.

akavlie 15y ago

I tried to switch to DDG recently; after a couple of weeks using it as my default search engine in Chrome, I had to switch back to Google. Speed was a pretty big factor, but more than that, the search results just didn't compare. Still, I'm rooting for them, and hope that they're able to close the gap, both in speed and results. I love their style, and all of the site-specific search shortcuts.

cromwellian 15y ago

DDG: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+movie+where+evil+is+in+a+toaster+oven http://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+movie+where+evil+is+in+a+toaste... Time Bandits is #8 vs https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=the+movie+where+evil+is+in+a+toaster+oven https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=the+mo... First hit. I realize it is in fashion to make bold claims that somehow Google destroyed its search in a monomaniacal pursuit of social, but a hyperbolic if not patently untrue story. Yes, the user interface has changed and gotten fancier and more cluttered with the introduction of toolbar and sidebar (that's been happening over years, prior to G+), but the actual organic results have not changed much at all except to improve on average, even if you take into account Search Plus Your World (which you can disable) Shocking, but most people at Google do not work on G+, it is not the sole focus of the company, and the narrative that Google is simply dropping everything else to mindlessly chase Facebook is blogosphere fiction. There are over 30,000 employees and I would be surprised if even 2% of them worked on G+. Teams at Google are typically small and at any given time, people are working on a large number of projects. It's simply not Google's culture to mindlessly focus on a single unproven product to the detriment of others. If anything, Google is frequently criticized for doing too many new things at once, and that's what you get when you have a company run with engineering culture. Google makes most of their money from Search and Ads. You can bet that they watch data from search quality and marketshare like a hawk, and if social was causing Google search to suck more and lose customers, you can bet they'd turn it off in a heartbeat. It's been said by some analysts that every 1% loss in search marketshare is $1 billion in revenue. Facebook isn't making that much money, and so from a cost-benefit analysis, sacrificing billions in search share revenue to try and gain social-search revenue doesn't sound rational. It would thus be reasonable to assume, that any changes Google actually makes to core search are a) conservative b) subjected to a battery of scientific tests and c) as low risk as they can make them to their core business. But the way you read things in the Blogosphere, Search has been radically altered. The evidence just isn't there.

krelian 15y ago
It's very common these days to take many amazing products for granted. Google search is an amazing tool that suffers a lot from very vocal complaints and not enough praise. The only areas it is lacking in are those that are heavily targeted by spammers.

wastedbrains 15y ago

Hooray I like DDG and switched awhile ago making it my default search. Congrats.

thecombjelly 15y ago

I don't really understand why so many people think that the results on DDG are worse than Google. Maybe I just don't search for things that other people do, or I search differently, but for me, I usually prefer the DDG results. Most of it has to do with the zero click info and the disambiguation. Especially the disambiguation. I get better results because most things I search for could be disambiguated, and I take full advantage of that to quickly give me just the results related to what I'm looking for.

wilfra 15y ago

Google has been annoying me lately. I'm willing to give this a shot. Good luck DDG. Resetting Chrome default search engine now.

nullflux 15y ago

The thing that worries me about DDG is their reliance on others' search engines. If there was ever a true defection from one of the big guys' services to DDG (i.e., if DDG was actually blowing up), it seems to me they'd just replicate many of DDG's features for their userbase and DDG would wither, or even just pull DDG's access to their search engines.

ph33r 15y ago

Last week I was searching for a: Sabian 18" HHX Chinese cymbal. I was considering buying one for my kit and wanted to see some reviews, video samples, prices etc. DuckDuckGo: The top there results were American Ebay search results (I live in Canada), a drum shop in Memphis (15 hour drive), and various other online stores (discountdrumequipment.info). Google: The first page of results had links to the official Sabian product pages, Youtube videos of people playing it, and the most impressive thing was a 3 day old Kijiji ad (again, I live in Canada) with the exact cymbal I wanted for a good price in a city just 45 minutes from me. I responded to the ad, drove the 45 minutes, and purchased it. DuckDuckGo's stance on user privacy is admirable, but Google still gets my vote... it's accuracy still impresses me.

Craiggybear 15y ago

Treading carefully here ... I love DDG and find it yields far more useful results than anything else. Besides, I like not getting tracked all the time and I can switch off ads without needing any extensions. That in my view is a very civilised set of options and the rest of the Internet should follow by example.

yuletide666 15y ago

Chrome autocomplete support would be awesome.

tswartz 15y ago

Yes, I've noticed an increase in speed over the last couple of days. Keep up the good work!

visarg 15y ago

I like their attitude, but... it needs more speed and better results, though using Bing as a source this might not be possible. The lack of image, news and video search is a problem too. Actually, I use quite often book search, scholar and maps too. In order to be a complete search solution, you need more than web search today.

eru 15y ago

It would be nice to see those graphs with a logarithmic y-axis.

radge 15y ago

I really wish I could use DDG on iOS then I could fully replace google.

zmmmmm 15y ago

Have been using DDG for the last 2 months but have to admit I'm feeling withdrawal symptoms, mainly due to speed. I hope that the increase in traffic is mainly responsible for things being a bit slow - the sluggishness (NOT results) is the primary thing making me yearn for Google at the moment.

theDaveB 15y ago

I can't seem to get DDG to show me UK results, although I have set my preferences to UK. Still shows amazon.com when searching for products etc... Search for the same thing on google.co.uk and it always shows me .co.uk sites. I tend to use DDG as my first choice and only switch to google if I can't find something. Dave

leojg 15y ago

I started to use it about a couple of weeks ago

duncanj 15y ago

Give me a quick (or configurable, or special URL) that includes a "search on Google Scholar" link and I will switch from Google. Ever since Google's visual refresh that removed the menu item for search on google scholar, I've lost one of my timesavers.

whackberry 15y ago

Hi, I've only been using DuckDuckGo lately and I love it. Search quality is so impressive and the respect for privacy is very welcome. I hope it is able to maintain this independent feel and not sell out like others did.

nl 15y ago

Wed 28-Mar-2012 1,518,581 direct 9,580,029 api 225,161 bot Am I reading this right? DDG does ~6 times as much traffic in API requests compared to search requests? That makes a pretty significant difference to the monetisation strategy!

jeltz 15y ago
Note though that the growth of direct requests is much faster than the growth of API requests.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

kirillzubovsky 15y ago

Did you know Duck.com redirects to Google.com? That's pretty smart of Google. In other thoughts, congratulations on the exploding growth!

hm2k 15y ago

Tip: Use the short URL ddg.gg for less typing.

fotonobile 15y ago

You are #1 for programming related queries. I am curious about seeing you build up the similar precision/recall for other areas.

ExxKA 15y ago

Nice! You guys deserve it

pferde 15y ago

Careful with the headline, I'm sure it caused some terrorist alert bells to ring in som US three-letter agency. :)

snowpolar 15y ago

I feel part of it's sudden huge growth has to do with udacity search engine course.

shaggy 15y ago

It's very exciting to see usage of DDG increasing and the service getting more and more recognition. I've been using DDG for almost two years now and love the service. The privacy is what drew me in, but the goodies are what made me a user for life. It's the default for my browser and I use the iPhone and iPad apps regularly. Keep up the good work DDG! I'd be happy to lend my sysadmin skills to help :)

Darraghb 15y ago

Great to see DDG gaining traction. However, I switched my Chrome search to DDG last year and the one thing that I realised I couldn't live without was maps. I didn't realise how often I must search for an address and to have location appear in search makes life so much easier. If you guys integrated with Openstreetmap, I'd switch back in an instant!

GFischer 15y ago
I'm a heavy Google Maps user as well. OSM integration would be nice, but I've found that DDG still has slightly inferior results to Google. I do like the approach to privacy and occasionaly use it :)

FredBrach 15y ago

I'm using DuckDuckGo since two days now as default everything (since I've read this thread) and my surprise is that I've not switch back to google yet. Hey that's awesome since I'm not specially an early adopter statistically. Btw, I particularly like the insight box.

asymmetric 15y ago

congrats. i stopped using google after their last policy change. DDG mostly fits the bill, apart from some special cases.

tete 15y ago

The only thing that's missing from DDG taking over the world is good i18n. Really, it's the only thing that ever made it impossible for me to recommend it. A lot of especially older people outside the US use Google mainly because they don't or can't care for the rest of the world and simply don't have the required English skills. This isn't just about the interface language and search results, but also about !bangs. To be useable !ebay has to use the the already available region setting. Other than that I have been an advocate from the early days, because DDG is what the world needs.

joeblau 15y ago

I've been using this search engine for a week and I really like it. The only thing I've noticed is that Google has conditioned me to never look at the top section because that's where sponsored ad's are so I have to force myself to click on the top link. Brainwashed by GOOG :)

mbtforshoes 15y ago

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