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Comment by harianus | Hacker News Reader

This is amazing. So many people are starting to de-Google their life. It somehow become a popular subject. Earlier this week Fast Company wrote [1] about it, DuckDuckGo reached 1 billion monthly searches [2] and it's a common thing to see in Hacker News' posts lately.

I'm personally very happy with the raise of awareness. I'm hoping it's will reach the regular folks.

I realized this a few months ago when I started Simple Analytics [3]. I see that advertising is almost done automatically by the press. When Facebook or Google has bad press, it's great for privacy first tools.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90300072/its-time-to-ditch-googl...

[2] https://twitter.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1091709578444750849

[3] https://simpleanalytics.io/?ref=news.ycombinator.com

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> So many people are starting to de-Google their life

I'm sorry to be that guy but... citation needed. What evidence is there that this is anything but a fringe movement within the tech community let alone mainstream in any way, shape or form? And "common thing to see in HN posts lately" isn't evidence of that, sorry.

> DuckDuckGo reached 1 billion monthly searches

Two questions:

1. How much time do you think it takes for Google to reach 1B searches? and

2. How many DDG users routinely use !g (or otherwise use Google results)?

As much as HNers like to bang the drum about "privacy" the term is ill-defined. Take search because its straightforward. Your search results are personalized by a bunch of factors including, but not limited to:

- Previous searches

- Location

- Language

- Inferred or actual demographics

The fringe privacy element is I guess most concerned with previous searches? Or is it all of the above? And if you say that location is not OK, take a simple search for "bakery". Isn't it better UX to show local bakeries?

Another question: the alternative to "free" (ie ad-supported) models is user pays. How exactly does this work for users in the developing world for whom $5/month might be a significant amount of money? Will they value their "privacy" the same way?

The assumption (by DDGers and their ilk) that using [Big company products] is some Faustian bargain is hyperbolic and unsubstantiated.

In places where $5 a month might be too much they are worth much less to google with fewer people targeting that group. Privacy isn't as big of a concern as access issues.

No one targets the 99% percentile directly. It is much cheaper to go non-targeted advertising and hit as many people as possible perhaps targeting at the country/region or language level only.

DuckDuckGo is really Bing under the covers... People are literally moving from Google back to Microsoft, and feeling good about it because it has different branding.

Source: https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-Bing-API-used-by-DuckDuckGo

...and feeling good about it because DDG protects their privacy.

I’m not particularly concerned with the backing engine as long as they’re not tracking me and I’m getting acceptable results.

Why not make a wrapper around SerpApi.com/search and use Google behind proxies then?

Like this? https://www.startpage.com/

DuckDuckGo says otherwise [1] and the founder explains their Bing use [2] on their forum [3].

[1] https://duck.co/help/results/sources

[2] https://duck.co/forum/comment/27893

[3] https://duck.co/forum/thread/4350/did-you-know-that-duckduck...

I'll note that both of those forum links are from 8 years ago and may not entirely reflect current practice. Their "Sources" page also notes their own crawler the DuckDuckBot, and references connections with more specialized searches like Yelp and Stack Overflow.

Just to give a bit of context, that forum discussion was 8 months before Snapchat was founded and 6 months before Google bought Motorola Mobility (which split off just before the thread in question).

Your first link basically confirms it.

> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

All organic links are sourced from Oath and Bing. The other 400 sources (and their crawler) are only used for widget style stuff.

> variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

They use Bing. That's something else than:

> DuckDuckGo is really Bing under the covers [...]

Strange. I just searched for 'KlaxonException: Unable to instantiate with parameters' without the quotes

Bing returned just one result - An issue on Github

DDG shows multiple results. The bing one is result number 4.

I think they include Bing results but augment it with their own spider.

How is that source credible? He works for neither DuckDuckGo nor Bing. For the record I did the thing he suggests: the same search on DDG and Bing–the results are not identical.

"DuckDuckGo is really Bing under the covers..."

This is not a new thing. Historically speaking numerous "search engines" have actually used different engines under the hood. Yahoo hasn't been "Yahoo" in a long time, for instance, and I believe AltaVista moved from its own engine to somebody else's for a good long time before its demise.

(There's probably an interesting and nuanced discussion of the virtues and perils of a search engine provider depending on another company for something so critical. I hope DDG is investing significantly into their own engine, even if it's not ready-to-go.)

And it's a real change. I wouldn't even particularly care if DuckDuckGo did use Google, because the things about Google I find most objectionable would still be solved by proxying through DDG. Not 100%. The result might serve AMP pages, which is annoying, and not being a Silicon Valley liberal, I can clearly see how censorious Google is with its search results, or at least, how much they tilt the scales in their own political favor. But the primary issue, tracking me and the monetization thereto, would still be solved.

Nothing to do with branding. Moving off Google has privacy benefits. I'm feeling good because I'm less dissected by one single company.

I literally trust MS more than Google at this point, so... OK?

And this is how you know that we are in trouble. I don't like this version of the matrix and formally request a reboot.

Why does it matter that search engines use other search engines by proxy?

Using DDG for Bing, or Startpage.com/Ixquick for Google, or Searx for either of them, should not provide the original search engine with your data. Bing and Google should just see actually anonymous search queries coming in from DDG / Startpage / whatever you're using, instead of seeing the search requests coming from your browser session.

At least this is my understanding of it - please correct me if I understand this wrong. But if this is the right way to understand it, I don't get how using DDG would then be equivalent to using a Microsoft product directly.

That's not a privacy issue. But indeed, you will support Microsoft when using DuckDuckGo. I believe it's necessary to use a big search engine before building your own.

Their ads also run via Bing Ads. This is something they really should change a believe. I tried to run ads for Simple Analytics on DDG but it feels very wrong to use Bing Ads for that. You can't also select "Run on DuckDuckGo only". I think they should move to something of themselves which is likely to happen if they grow bigger.

I don't understand why people spread such fake news so readily. In this case you can TRIVIALLY prove this true or false. Did you decide to test this before stating it? No, obviously not.

I decided to search for "space engine exhaust". The reason I searched for this is because it has some hot keywords, but also some keywords that are probably fairly uncommon. The idea was to get a mix of softball hits along with some per engine unique hits. And it looks like it was a pretty good test query. Here they are:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=space+engine+exhaust

https://www.bing.com/search?q=space+engine+exhaust

And, lo and behold, they give very different results. DuckDuckGo may utilize Bing's results, but they are not "Bing under the covers" by any stretch of the imagination.

-----

Just for the sake of completion here is the google search for the same:

https://www.google.com/search?q=space+engine+exhaust

Interestingly enough I think is a good example of the increasingly large percent of queries where Google gives the clearly worst results. Their top 4/4 results all being for spaceengine.org which is a universe simulator, but very unlikely to be what somebody who was searching for 'space engine exhaust' was after.

It's not fake news. They confirm it themselves: https://duck.co/help/results/sources

> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

In other words, all organic results are from Bing and Oath.

> here is the google search for the same

That's one of the issues for me: those are your results, but there's no telling what anyone else might get when clicking on that link. "Feeds" of all kind, personalized by black boxes rather than explicit parameters we have access to, deprive us of a common (virtual) world to discuss.

My top 4 results were http://spaceengine.org/support-old/ , http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?t=33 , https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/05/23/the-... and https://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/system/system_SSME.html

Yeah, this is a very good point. I never use Google anymore and assumed that going incognito would have been enough to get roughly 'bare' results. Perhaps a reminder that just because you don't use Google doesn't mean that Google isn't tracking you extensively in any case due to analytics and countless other indirect forms of tracking and profiling.

I just kept reloading the same search through a bunch of different TOR identities + anti-finger printing, and it was like playing search roulette. And indeed there were, on occasion, actually some great results that don't show up elsewhere. It's such a shame that they're all masked behind some black box of tracking with another black box of ML and filtering. It's like two people going to the same library where librarian deciding to hide books from one person or the other because she, and her all seeing eye, thought they'd have less interest in them than other books.

I get exactly same results for those two searches. Calling BING API repeatedly may sometimes result in different results.

Can you mention the results you're getting? I see 10 results on DDG. There are only 4 shared results:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Main_Engine

https://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/system/system_SSME.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/05/23/the-...

http://www.braeunig.us/space/propuls.htm

-------------------

The 6 nonshared results are:

http://spaceengine.org/manual/making-addons/creating-a-ship/

https://phys.org/news/2018-11-ion-space-aircraft.html

https://www.meineke.com/blog/dual-exhausts-just-for-looks/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)

https://www.space.com/34192-spacex-raptor-rocket-test-first-...

http://spaceengineers.wikia.com/wiki/Thruster_mechanics

-----

I just tested this from various countries to ensure this was not biasing it. It wasn't. Bing gives localized results, such as German results when searching from Germany. DDG gives identical results from any country. So presumably everybody is getting these same results from DDG. Are you saying this is also exactly what you got from Bing?

> Source : "growth hacker, likes online marketing"

You need a better source, IMHO.

DDG themselves claim to use multiple sources, including Bing (but not including Google). I've seen DDG == Bing mentioned enough times that I'm inclined to believe they leverage it heavily, but it doesn't seem as unnuanced as just spitting out Bing API results 1:1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

It's all Bing and Oath.

> It's all Bing and Oath

That statement isn't fully supported by the link you provided. It does however seem reasonable that DDG results are based in large part on Bing and Oath.

"In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing."

Really enjoyed the video on your landing page. Seemed initially cheesy but ended up being perfect.

Thank you! I fill forward your comment to the creators.

I've been looking for other analytics solutions that aren't creepy, your timing is great. Looks promising!

> So many people are starting to de-Google their life.

Is this actually true or just an anecdote? Last time I checked the market share for core Google products was growing everywhere except in China, especially in Europe where EU has been killing off the remaining competition through GDPR et al.

I'm all for seeing newcomers take on the incumbent behemoths, but I also like true information.

It can be both. They can get new customers in markets while old customers are actively trying to move away from them in higher numbers than ever before.

I'm one of them. While I'm not completely de-Google-ing my life, I did set up Firefox at work and use DuckDuckGo for my searches there now.

I do not like DDG. Google almost always gave me what I wanted, whereas DDG is about 80% of the time. I often end up wishing I'd just used Google the first time instead. 80% sounds like a good number, but it means that I'm often frustrated with it when I wouldn't have been with Google.

I'm seeing this trend (it is a personal statement), and if I look at Googles popularity in Google Trends [1] it's going down in the last 5 years. It's still huge compared to privacy first products like DuckDuckGo [2].

Again, it's my view around me. I didn't have my business yet so it could be that my eyes are more open to privacy first products.

[1] https://g.co/trends/363ud

[2] https://g.co/trends/a7kcZ

I'm not sure that the trend of fewer people googling Google on Google means fewer people are using Google.

It does: https://www.statista.com/statistics/267161/market-share-of-s...

That's closer to the point, but market share dropping only implies fewer users if the total number of users is stagnant. If the search market is still growing it could just mean Google is growing at a slower rate than other search engines.

What public metric would you use to prove this (or the opposite of this) point?

>I'm seeing this trend (it is a personal statement)

So it's anecdata..

It was based on that, but if I look at market share of Google Search in America [1] it goes down for quite some years already.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267161/market-share-of-s...

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