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"I can think of a number of widely touted alternatives which utterly failed to do so: Cuil, Bing, Blekko, A9, Teoma, and more" Fanchildren, stop. You know tha

• dredmorbius 12y ago
  I'm aware that DDG relies heavily on Bing. But that only highlights the dynamic at play: the issue hasn't been technical elements of delivering search results, but providing a compelling case to switch. There's the additional situation that I'm absolutely no fan of Microsoft and trust them to my search data even less than I do Google. Handing either my queries via anonymizing proxies is rather more palatable, however. DDG's share of search is still small, but its growth rate is on fire. It also seems to be largely organic (today's announcement by Apple would be an exception to this), which strikes me as generally more persuasive than growth driven by various sorts of gimmickery (see the extensive manipulations of web server stats Microsoft attempted through the years largely through changing parked domain hosting status). Do you have a reference for search engine ranking? I'm not turning up any clear stats, though from Fool.com I get a reference to 4.7 million queries/day vs. 3 billion for Google. That puts DDG at 1/640th Google's traffic, though as I said: growing quickly. http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/04/07/how-duckduckgo-is-positioning-itself-to-take-on-go.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/04/07/how-duckduc...
  • pooper 12y ago
    Isn't Microsoft just supporting them to counter Google? I read somewhere (I have tried to find it again but I have failed so far) that Bing's cost of operation per search query was more than ten times that of Google. I understand that DDG does not have to fulfill every Google use case. However, I don't see it likely that they're going to be number one any time soon. There are multiple discussions on HN where people say that if you can't be number one, you must shut down and walk away (I think we said something similar about Spring pad). Here we are encouraging DDG even though we know it will likely not be number one. I am confused.
    • dredmorbius 12y ago
      Isn't Microsoft just supporting them to counter Google? As is Apple now. Pretty much, though if DDG can make a go of it on their own, so much the better. Sometimes balancing things against one another is useful. Actually, more than sometimes. And if all it does is convince Google to stop ingesting so fucking much personal data I'll consider it mission fucking accomplished. Though what I'd really like to see is a true distributed search engine capability emerge. There's a tool for this (YaCy) though it's still fairly rudimentary (and is Java based, which I'm increasingly allergic to).
    • jeena 12y ago
      > if you can't be number one, you must shut down and walk away What a terrible and insane advice! Apple doesn't sell as many phones as Samsung and therefor they should shut down and walk? Or am I missing something here?
      • pooper 12y ago
        Don't quote me on this but this seemed to be the consensus in the spring pad shutdown thread right here on HN. How is this any different? Well, Apple doesn't sell nearly as many phones as Samsung but they are probably an anomaly as they have high margins and are sitting on a huge pile of cash. They can afford to tough it out. I see your point now actually. I doubt if Apple ever needs to be in "first place". They are doing perfectly well where they are and I guess holding a fourth to fifth of all app phones is a pretty good spot when the bill of materials is less than $200 and the sale price is $600. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829901
• erichurkman 12y ago
  To me, this screams that there's an interface problem for other search engines. Google gained the majority of market share when they were providing clean and simple search results while competitors littered pages with tons of ads, banners, "curated" (often shoddy, paid) content, and oh-so-many portals. Bing's search results are OK, but when you compare the search result pages, DuckDuckGo is much cleaner and easier to navigate even with the same results. Google is almost as bad as Bing now, where the number of ads outnumber actual search results. Bing, to me, tries too hard to be a destination, rather than a highly tuned tool to help me find websites.
  • pestaa 12y ago
    If I recall history correctly, Google was the first to monetize SERPs with ads. It is their golden goose.
    • lazyjones 12y ago
      > If I recall history correctly, Google was the first to monetize SERPs with ads. You don't. All major SE that predated Google did so, from AltaVista to Yahoo... I used to maintain a CGI-based wrapper for a bunch of SE (these 2 plus "USE IT!", Lycos, Infoseek, WWWW, anyone remember them?) in the mid-/late 90's that removed the annoying ads from search results. Google was the first SE with text based ads though, from what I remember.
      • dredmorbius 12y ago
        More to the point: where the early search engines were placing paid results directly into SERPs, Google has pretty much always distinguished its search results from advertising. Not always with crystal clarity, but reasonably well. This from a critic.
        • lazyjones 12y ago
          Early SE used graphical ads that were clearly distinguishable from search results (although yes, some search results were probably unmarked paid placements, which would be illegal in some countries nowdays). The current situation is worse for users both on Google and competing SEs, paid text ads are put in front of and made to look like search results. On mobile browsers, you typically have to scroll past several ads to see a single real search result.
• sirdogealot 12y ago
  Bing was actually more accurate than DDG. It provided a local apple store which I know of as the 5th result when DDG just showed the generic untargeted bing results.
  • foxylad 12y ago
    Interesting - so you perceive non-anonymised results as better. DDG's main drawcard is anonymity, and Google/Bing are hoping the masses will prefer customised results. So if your perception is common, DDG is in trouble. Or perhaps they can find a way to provide location data in their anonymised searches.
    • grn 12y ago
      Many of my friends, technical and non-technical, do prefer tracking precisely for this reason. They find it more convenient that the search engine knows their preferences, location, etc.
  • dredmorbius 12y ago
    That's because DDG isn't geocoding you. "apple store" + ZIP or city name should work.
  • jpatokal 12y ago
    Yes, that "untargeting" would be the whole point of using "a search engine that doesn’t track you".