5 ms·
Duck Duck Go is blowing up again
- unknownian 13y agoRecently I learned that DDG donates a portion of profits to Trisquel http://trisquel.info/ http://trisquel.info/ (bottom of page) and probably other projects. That's pretty cool.
- thejosh 13y agoDefault search engine for gnome isn't it? Or is it something else?
- ZoF 13y agoYou are correct, they switched from google pretty recently
- thejosh 13y agoWould it account for the major surge though?
- rwolf 13y agoDefault switch happened in August https://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2013-08.html https://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2013-08.html while spike appeared to start 2 months previous.
- kmfrk 13y agoSpeaking of which, I can't for the life of me unsubscribe from DDG, no matter how many times I tell them to stop pestering me on the unsubscribe service. Does anyone else have the same problem?
- stephengillie 13y agoIs the email being forwarded from another account? I work for a service that sends marketing emails to a large userbase, and that's the most common issue with unsubscribing -- that your email address isn't the one subscribed.
- _zekiel 13y agoHave you tried the link at the bottom of the newsletter? Clicking it should unsub you: http://flash.duckduckgo.com/e.js?remove_address=core@duckduckgo.com http://flash.duckduckgo.com/e.js?remove_address=core@duckduc... If that doesn't work, please email inbound@duckduckgo.com
- kmfrk 13y agoI have, but I'll try the lastter e-mail - thanks.
- onethumb 13y agoAnd for some reason, Google Chrome (conspiracy theorists erupt!) thinks this page isn't in English: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/6vq7ubvff7x4g55/2013-09-12%20at%207.57%20PM.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/6vq7ubvff7x4g55/2013-09-...
- TallGuyShort 13y agoI've tried DDG before on several occasions, but always got frustrated with the quality of the search results and changed back. After PRISM, I started finding Google's results less and less accurate, so I tried again. I now find that for most of the searches I do, DDG results are letting me find what I need faster than I can with Google... Kudos to them! I applaud both their technical achievements and their principles.
- educating 13y agoI'm glad you said this, because it was the reason I stopped also. I'll give it another try at home. However there are a lot of times at work where having search results relevant to me is essential. Since DDG is all about not being the search bubble, to use them all of the time, I'd have to change the way I worked to bookmark my projects and search for my blog entries in the blog's search bar instead of just using the omnibox in Chrome (that is using Google) for everything. Reason #2 is that search advertising helps pay for the GMail service that I rely on. I don't want to go back to my cable company's email accounts. Yuck. Terrible spam filtering and much worse webmail UI. But, I'd like to stop using Google as much as the next guy. I'm waaaay too reliant, and I'd be surprised if the U.S. hasn't infiltrated their employee ranks, along with other countries, for greater influence and access to data than is even currently known by congress. Using Google is like living in a whorehouse.
- jaryd 13y agoWith regards to your email: I recently switched from Google Apps (free tier) to Fastmail.fm and the transition has been pretty seamless. The interface is snappy and decent looking, and importing all of my gmail over IMAP worked well. On the other hand, I now pay a yearly fee for my email. The fee is fairly nominal (~$40/year for a mid-range account), and my money ensures that Fastmail doesn't need to harvest my content to keep the lights on.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- 13y ago
- cgman 13y agoCan you stop promoting you crappy search engine here. It returns junk results and looks like Godzilla's poop.
- thepicard 13y agoCan you whine some more?
- skierscott 13y agoIt's been my default search engine for a while. My observations: 1. The bang syntax is rather convenient. I'm an Alfred user (Mac OSX), and I can easily get nearly everywhere with !. 2. The results are getting much better. I often search for something and think "these results aren't good enough" and do !g for google. The top link on google is the normally the second or third link on DDG.
- graeme 13y agoIs this the same blowup that happened a week or two ago? I think this is great news. But the headline may be misleading, it made me think there had been a third blowup.
- zenocon 13y agoAlso switched to DDG for about 2 months, and more often than not had to preface every search with !g I really want to like and use DDG, but....
- mililani 13y agoOh wow, thank for reminding me to switch my default search engine back to Duck Duck Go.
- john2x 13y agoI used to use DDG as my primary search engine before, but after a while I found that clicking on the search results takes a long time before the page opens. It didn't happen with Google. Never understood why that was. Just tried again today, and it seems alright now. I'll switch back and see.
- Q4273j3b 13y agoSomeone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I assumed the lag was because DDG doesn't let result pages know what search terms you used to find them, and was sending you through some generic middle page to hide that info? I think you're right about speed, though. DDG just keeps getting better. Did you know if the mouse is hovering over a DDG result, you can press o to to open it? And I think there's a way to navigate through results using only keys... I forgot how though...
- anigbrowl 13y ago4m searches per day? They have some way to go before catching google's ~5 billion/day. http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/ DDG is a fine service but the hype about its traffic levels feels pretty forced.
- stephen_g 13y agoI think 800% larger traffic than what they had eighteen months ago is pretty impressive. But since they're not as big as Google nobody should care?
- anigbrowl 13y agoI don't. Doublign every six months is nothing to be embarrassed about but it's not especially epic. Contrast, say, Vine - which grew about 4000% in the first 6 months of this year: http://www.wired.com/business/2013/06/twitter-vine-growth/ http://www.wired.com/business/2013/06/twitter-vine-growth/
- frozenport 13y agoMost importantly, it is not clear if it is due to utility of their service or a moral conviction to avoid Google.
- redthrowaway 13y agoI hate to admit it, but Google's omniscience as regards my personal life makes for some really damned relevant SERPs. I might be able to overlook that in order to guard my privacy, but I doubt my mom would. I simply can't see any Google competitor, let alone DDG, providing more relevant results without invading my privacy and, by extension, sharing everything about me with the USG. I wish it were otherwise, but I'm unfortunately convinced that we lost this one for all but a dedicated few a la FSF.
- webwright 13y agoSearches per day seems less interesting than "number of people who use DDG daily" (which might admittedly be challenging to know depending on how deeply DDG goes down the privacy road). A little googling shows that people search 60+ times per day (i imagine DDG users search on the high side). So I'd guess DDG has... 60-70k people using it as their primary search engine?
- randartie 13y agoAren't the 2 probably directly correlated in regards to percentage growth over time (which is what I think they want to show)?
- dil8 13y agoI am pretty much using DDG for most searches, with Google now being the exception. I did take a little while to get used too, but now it seems natural to search using DDG.
- benblodgett 13y agoI think DDG would be a much more viable option if they owned ddg.com. The reason I still use google is because it flows naturally on the keyboard. I use search as a navigation method, and typing duckduckgo.com is annoying. I would absolutely make the full switch if command + t + ddg.com + query returned what I wanted. The search results are good, I salute you for that, but it's just not convenient so I still find myself at google. You are asking for a major workflow change but not making it easy.
- shmerl 13y agoI miss a few things there such as filtering by date and image search. Also, in some cases Google still produces better results. But I switched to DDG as a default search engine in Firefox, and use Google as a fallback only once in a while. My only concern was that it takes away from Mozilla since they have a deal with Google, but what can you do...
- rogerbinns 13y agoSadly DDG does have some bugs. I reported this one a few weeks ago but nothing ever happened. They keep adding a www. prefix to urls even when the original site didn't have it. For example look at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apsw https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apsw and look at the 3rd result at Google Code (Python, my project). They make the result URL be www.code.google.com but there is no www and clicking gives an error. They seem to be second guessing if a www prefix is needed, usually guessing right, and then getting it wrong. Having to edit the www back out of URLs is a pain.