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Comment by pmyjavec | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if other search engines are also starting to catch up?

I've been using DuckDuckGo for a while now and there was a time when it felt like I was missing out; However the product has improved dramatically of late and forget I'm no longer using Google.

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Its hard to believe, because tracking and especially tracking over search history both over the immediate term and the somewhat longer term is exactly what enables Google to surface such good results.

I've disabled search history and Google still tends to give me the most relevant results. Perhaps they also do some customization based on session cookie or something (I know YouTube does for recommendations) and I'm pretty sure IP location still plays a role. But I think it's mainly that I know how to ask Google for what I want, not that Google knows what I want necessarily. I still give DDG and Bing a chance once in a while, just in case, but old habits die hard.

I understand the theory behind all that but I'm preferring the results DDG is now giving me. The bangs feature is also really nice.

I actually used DuckDuckGo about a year ago but I went back to Google after a month as the results felt crap, but I gave it a try recently and haven't looked back.

I haven't felt this was since leaving Altavista!

DuckDuckGo's results have definitely improved over the last year. I now prefer DuckDuckGo's SERP UI over Google's and really like the !bang searches. I only need to use Google (!g) when looking for some very technical or recently-crawled pages.

The current search market is ~4.6 billion searches per day. Google owns about 75% of the market, with ~3.5 billion searches per day. DuckDuckGo has about 12 million searches per day, ~0.25% of the market. Bing/Yahoo are the other big players in the search market, with between ~10-12% each.

I get 70% as many readers to my blog from duckduckgo as bing (and 3x yahoo), so I imagine they are well positioned to get a boost from tech people recommending it to their families.

Right, those recommendations would've helped with Google's swift uptake. I remember advocating Google to everyone and they were hesitant to try but gave it ago because I was a considered a 'tech head' they trusted my recommendation.

If technology people start to prefer DuckDuckGo things may shift quickly.

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