DuckDuckGo Traffic
duckduckgo.com
duckduckgo.com
!g (search on Google) also makes it far easier to switch. Don’t like the results? Prefix !g and try again.
My other favorites:
!sr [name of subreddit] - much faster than “reddit.com/r/[name]”
!r - Reddit
!w - Wikipedia
!cache - get Google’s cache of a page
!hn - HN Search
!godoc - Search godoc.org for documentation on a Go package. Your favorite language is probably represented
> I know Firefox had install-your-own search plugins forever, but the total lack of friction of typing “!yt badgerbadgerbadger” to get specifically YouTube results was fantastic.
I find "use your own search" to be much less friction than going through DDG since it takes me right to results from the custom search, rather than having to redirect through DDG before going to the results. (Edited to add the following) I'm not going to lie and say that it doesn't make me a little paranoid to think of EVERY search I do going through one provider regardless of their current privacy stance.
I've used them since 2002ish in Opera, continued using them in Chrome, and now I use them in Firefox.
AFAIK you don't even need "install-your-own search plugins" -- just right-click on the search box on the site you want to search, and add keyword.
For example, I have "aj" for Amazon Japan and "au" for Amazon US, so I can just hit cmd-t for a new tab and type "au pretzels" directly in the address bar.
This has the advantage of letting you define your own, too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20056174
re: ease of searching within sites and building that availability (of sites) up
You can of course do this in Firefox as well, but in Chrome -besides Chrome most of the time just adding them automatically- there's a simple preference pane where I can easily configure the three important parts; keyword, pretty title, and search URL with %s as the search token.
I wish Firefox would add this, it's a big holdover for me.
In Chrome's address bar, you type the name of a site (say reddit.com), then tab, then some keywords, and that does a google search for your keywords inside reddit.com?
I was totally with you on Opera in 2002, however :) All the way until they dumped their own engine and lost many of their unique features. It was still kinda fun to use last time I installed it though. But it also feels just like Chromium with some stuff tacked on.
You can even use DDG bangs as your keywords. I do this for the bangs that I use most frequently (e.g. !w) for both reduced latency and increased privacy. This means I keep the muscle memory for using bangs on other folks machines, but I still get improved privacy and speed on devices that have my bookmarks synced.
Better? Depends on what you need!
I use Amazon Japan because I live here, though.
No.
> Do they work on Firefox for Android?
Yes.
Again, I think, I'm not sure ;)
I was thinking about OpenSearch custom search engines (being deprecated apparently as another comment notes, these appear on desktop as icons under the search input field "This time search with" and similarly in Android as icons above the on-screen keyboard. These definitely don't sync.
The other thing are bookmarks with the "keyword" property set. These do indeed sync, like other bookmarks.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/10/15/search-engine-add...
Does this mean I'll have to install an extension to replace each search keyword I have? That would be dozens of extensions, many of them for obscure niche websites.
It just won’t automatically create the URL pattern the site suggests.
However, I was wrong about OpenSearch providing the functionality that the "Add keyword for this search" bookmark feature implements. That feature is completely independent from OpenSearch and isn't going anyway.
"Add keyword for this search" via bookmarks are not going anywhere in Firefox as far as I can tell. This was a false alarm on my part.
Edit: Ah, I misunderstood. The bang prefix will send you over to the search results page of the site in question. That's pretty neat.
There is a lot of value to me in this, the user, but actually negative to google: you can't really justify inserting ads into keyboard navigation, can you.
!wen - English Wikipedia
!wpl - Polish
!wde - German
etc.It's especially awesome with all programming related bangs for quick documentation. Oh, and just `!` for 'I'm feeling ducky'.
e.g. y tab will let you search youtube, which is even a little faster than the DDG bangs for some sites.., but certainly acccompanied by unwanted privacy defaults.. not sure how much of it you can turn off and still use the feature..
!wde aldi
!wes la casa de papelAbout 6 months ago (a year? I can’t remember) I switched and haven’t looked back. Now, when I look at google, the results actually look less relevant. As well, the ads on Google have become very obnoxious. I don’t feel like I’m being served the best results but instead results of companies who paid the most.
You can switch to country mode but then it stops including loads of results.
A perfect example is when you search for a product or book or something. Without the switch, it returns the company website and amazon.com, the latter being utterly useless and irrelevant to anyone outside the US.
But if you turn the switch on, the company website disappears, but you get amazon.co.uk.
Or another example, I was searching for a butternut squash soup recipe. Oddly DDG had no BBC food results. Until I clicked the switch, then it did, but loads of good other recipes completely disappeared.
As for bar, restaurant, etc. names, ugh. DDG is useless.
They need to figure out how to do local searches with privacy, a way I can set a rough location and they remember it.
At the moment their location centric searches are a decade behind Google.
Conversely, I find it annoying when Google gives me Swedish results, just because my VPN happens to route through Uppsala today.
I've searched for books, bars, restaurants, opera, and plenty more in many countries (with VPN routed to plenty of other countries) in the last several years on DDG without any issues, and with no need to switch to other search engines.
While you might enjoy fiddling with your search engine every single time you want to do a location search, the vast majority of users don't and won't.
They've got to solve the problem of location searches if they want to move from being a fiddly niche product to a mainstream Google competitor.
I want them to because I would like to see them have wide spread adoption.
As well as change the stupid name.
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
Hmm I think the Bing is overemphasized if we say that "DuckDuckGo uses Bing underneath so the company whom you should really be complaining to is MSFT."
CMIIW!
It’s like saying “google just wants to create the illusion that they are more than a glorified frontend for a big iterative eigenvector solver”.
I love that DDG has almost no spam and the fact that it's so on point to the queries and doesnt perform the wide search. My dad has a few websites that he's visits daily, and he just goes to them directly. Since Google and DDG cant differentiate themselves much any more, I feel like the next direction for every tech company is a larger emphasis on user privacy and it's only going to be more important for already established markets as a differentiator.
Once DDG grows by 2x more, it'll become a significant competitor to Google. At the point, that additional data advantages likely approaches diminishing returns. Remember, network effects arent exponential in real life, they follow an "S" curve.
Despite both failing I tend to be a lot more lenient to google.
I’ve been using the web since the best option was Yahoo’s hand curated directories. Google is in really serious trouble. These search engine switches happen very quickly, as soon as one of them is showing better results, the switch happens abruptly and it’s one way.
For your convenience:
https://www.google.com/search?q=keris
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=keris
https://www.bing.com/search?q=keris
Now I use DDG exclusively.
!stack 'Error message'
Overall I still believe for sloppily constructed queries for which I want specific results Google seems to read my mind better and produce better results than DDG, but Google is very quirky.
[0]: http://jakegoulding.com/blog/2011/02/06/sqlite-64-bit-intege...
For me, on DDG, it's the first result on the 2nd page, on Google, it's the third result.
It would appear that DDG and Google's results differentiate in a way, that the sequence of words probably don't matter on DDG, but do matter on Google.
Now I almost never even use the bang commands, just pure DDG.
Inevitably, Google has succumbed to the same temptation that AltaVista did, and now there's a neat new upstart to come along, with a clean user interface and minimal cruft: DuckDuckGo.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
DuckDuckGo is 12 years old. They're far away from being a new upstart.
To put that into perspective, AltaVista's prime years only lasted six or seven years (~1996-2002; sold off in 2003). DDG is now one of the oldest independent search engines in Internet history.
Their very long-term, very slow, grinding upwards is one of the most amazing aspects of what they're accomplishing. It's incredibly difficult to do versus an entrenched monopoly (and one of the most powerful brands and corporations in the world at that). You almost never see it happen in tech once a monopoly is stable.
They seem to only use their crawler for Instant Answer type results while all their "traditional links" come from "a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing".
As others have shared I've used DDG off and on for a few years. In the beginning if I didn't see what I wanted I switched to google for that search but left DDG as the default. It's been quite a while since I last had to to this, DDG's results seem to be on par with G these days, at least in my experience.
Why don't people use ad-blockers?
Maybe I should give Bing another go?
If my search string has or shares close proximity to either an event in the past or a local event else where of a similar name, I rarely find my results.
For instance during the Australian Election recently, if I searched for Australian Election I was never returned results for the election occurring at that time (literally). Instead I was returned the results of the prior election, I assume the prior Australian Election has a higher search ranking than the election happening on that day.
NB: Maybe I need to get more Australian's on DDG...
Of course my searching habits have changed to counter act this, now I counter act this by adding either/or/both a locale and datetime and it nearly always works. I still have to use the !g for more specific searches but I say DDG covers 90% of my use cases now.
Edit: a lot, my post read like shit.
I guess Google obviously have more horsepower and manage to index in realtime majors news outlets and selected social accounts recursively.
What I only realized after a year or so, was that it defaults to off, and you actually need to turn it on, to get regional results. ("Oh, that's a button? Huh, I thought it was just graphics...")
I've been 100% DDG for ~6 months now and almost never have to use !g anymore. Part of the problem was getting over the anxiety of wanting to double check with Google every time I use the service. 99% of the time I use !g I get the same results as what I got from DDG anyway. Plus having the dark theme saves my eyes and battery.
Google now a days is optimised for top links and page only. If you didn't find what you wanted there, then the rest is not what you are looking for. Anything after first page on Google is 90% useless. Anything beyond first few links is useless. And those first links have a good chance of being filled with ads.
Let's just say there is no significant difference between white and black for LCDs in general.
I used to often use the !g bang to google a result if I didn't find what I was after, but over time the results on DDG and google have ended up roughly on par. And now I could never go back to using a search engine that lacks a bang-like interface.
I also like that my results aren't region specific unless I actually ask for a region specific result set. I had a lot of issues using google because it was constantly finding local things when I'm looking for something more global.
The way I see it is DDG doesn't assume to know best and gives you the tools to find the answer you're seeking. Google thinks they know best and if you're not after their "happy path" you won't be able to find what you're looking for no matter what. Look at how much they degraded the ability of things like quotes and pluses to affect the search.
It's awesome to see that DDG is continuing to grow. They're an awesome example of a product carving a niche against giants in a competitive field and it's inspirational to see.
It struggles a lot with Scandinavian languages being similar enough that search results will often default to another country, i.e. if searching in Danish you will get Norwegian results.
For anything news or tech related, i only use DDG, but for local queries, shopping etc, i sadly still default to using !g.
I just wish it did not use Apple Maps. I hadn't used it since it was launched, I thought it might have improved a bit, but no. A quick browse around Sydney shows so many mistakes. It doesn't even list Katoomba as a town, mislabels it "Blue Mountains" instead (which is the name of the government area/council).
I am not sure how they manage to get away with having maps that are simply wrong (the park next to where I live is mislabeled; instead a random piece of grass around 3 blocks south gets the park name). OpenStreetMap might not have fancy features, but at least it's accurate most of the time.
I’ve used DDG off and on, and I think the interface is fine (perhaps better these days as Google seems to have gotten worse), but I see the idea of selling clicks as being too lucrative.
Are we just rooting for the downfall of the incumbent / the rise of the underdog?
There is nothing to say what happened to Google wouldn’t happen to other companies. I assume some leaders have more self-control. But... I think the larger issue at hand isn’t to prevent it with Just One More Law (tm) or anything like that, but to instead actively chose to not use a fallen companies product and increase the awareness that Cool Company is now Evil Company. Let the problem correct itself.
In many ways they are more like a VPN company — a proxy for hire. If they want to expand, a good way would be to acquire Keybase or maybe something like https://bloom.sh and continue exploiting the inferior Google alternatives market.
> Are we just rooting for the downfall of the incumbent / the rise of the underdog?
Until somebody comes up with a better idea, yes.
As they've built their user base on privacy and those unhappy with Google, it's very unlikely the user base would shrug and carry on if DDG switch to Google mode tracking with all the dubious extras of data collection, and retargeting etc. Not that it's going to work though, as DDG have um, DDG search. No platform, no phone, no analytics, home speaker, fonts, domain registry, email etc, ad nauseum. So where to collect the data until they're a FANG monster with a finger in every pie?
So we either see it coming a long time off, or DDG become a privacy focused monster with fingers in lots of privacy aware pies. Or stay as just DDG privacy friendly search.
Also, while the ads shown to you may not use as many personalized signals as Google, they are syndicated through Yahoo/Bing which means if you ever click on one, that ad network knows that much more about you. They are tracking you just as much as Google, you just don't get the benefit of increased ad relevancy. So I really don't understand the win, except inasmuch as a lot of commenters on HN hate all things Google and this gives them a way to unplug.
https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-use...
A strange side-effect I noticed over this period was being able to find things _much quicker_ than my colleagues. I thought maybe I was just better at picking what words to type in - but after we did some comparisons, DDG really does just provide better results now (and increasingly so) for the kinds of searches we're doing.
The bangs are useful, but honestly I haven't really needed to use them. Occasionally I'll use a !g or !yt, but this is maybe 1% or less of my searches.
I've even taken the rare step of disabling uBlock and some other Firefox extensions because I _want_ DDG to succeed.
Duck Duck Go Traffic Daily Average Dec 2018: 31,037,684
=LN(3500000000)/(LN(47,942,069)-LN(31,037,684)) = 4.72 Years to catch up. Assuming steady percentage rate of growth and Google doesn't grow.
In 4.72 years, they would be at 48 * ( 48 / 31 )^4.72 = 378 millions / day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine#Market_share
If I am reading this correctly, ddg has about one fifth as much marketshare as the second place, which is quite impressive.
Bing has less than 3%, it operates at a loss. Not even MS cares about it and they just keep it around as a part of the technological suite that they have in order to convince the government that they are not a tech monopoly, even though everyone know they are. All big guys do this trick in one way or another.
For that reason I don't think one should compare DDG with anyone but google.
Option 2: Out of all the search engines competing with google, how is ddg positioned? Why is bing only 5 times its size considering it has MS's might behind it? How important is Baidu?
Option 2 undoubtedly makes for more interesting discussion. Also, if Bing is only a distraction/hobby for MS, then alternative options become even more important.
Where are you getting this number? I don’t think it’s even remotely close to this anymore.
DuckDuckGo and Qwant have favicons in their search results and they don't cause the same UX problems.
A more likely problem is the information density of the results pages. Google rarely manages to put more than a single search result above the fold on my screen, while DDG generally gets in six. That, unlike favicons, is a huge disparity between the two.
But since both DDG and Google have favicons on the results page, I find it hard to believe this is really a matter that has people moving to DDG. This hypothesis basically amounts to "people are blind idiots who notice favicons on one page but not the other", and I don't think that's true.
It's got >2600 upvotes and has been high on the front page for 18 hours now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823
> people are blind idiots
Hm...you may be onto something there :-)
I maintain that favicons are VERY low on the list of reasons people are switching from Google to DDG. DDG having favicons too should be proof enough of that.
The original tweet that started the whole discussion is: "There's something strange about the recent design change to google search results, favicons and extra header text: they all look like ads, which is perhaps the point?"
The comment you replied to said: "everyone is hating on Google's new search results, in part because of a distracting favicon" (emphasis mine).
There is no real inconsistency there, but for some reason you seem to have decided that there is and that it is very important.
Congratulations to the team behind this!
I expected Firefox to ship with DDG as the default but alas it did not to my surprise. Why is Google still the default in Firefox?
The results are sometimes worse, but at this point, I'm pretty happy with DDG. DuckDuckHack is discontinued though, which is a shame. I feel like it's one of their advantages (letting the community write new features into the engine), but they don't seem to want to do anything with it.
I'm not trying to throw mud at DDG's great accomplishments but it does feel a little deceiving if you just look at the graph and go out sharing it with your friends like they're outpacing Google or the search market overall 5-10% yearly growth, which means they are currently at par at most, once their initial boom passed.
The only thing that bugs me is regional result relevance. It gives you a toggle on/off for present country by IP; as far as I can tell it has no effect.
I get /en-us/ and amazon.com as (all) the top results whether it's on or off.
Still this isn't enough to take me away from the bangs and additional speed and privacy.
(Even when I see some joker/SEO is e.g. abusing Unicode to get bolding in DDG search results, saw that the other day)
If Amazon appears in the top 'web' results, it's always amazon.com (not .co.uk) however toggled. The sponsored links in 'shopping' results are always amazon.co.uk & £-figures though, however toggled.
Company websites, airlines, booking systems etc. that I know I'm going to need the /en-gb/ variant of invariably appear in results as /en-us/ URLs.
e.g. for Google, I just have to swipe "bang" at the and of any query to add "!g" at the end of it. DDG picks it up flawlessly - you don't have to mind the spacing, etc. Google fires up instantly.
The search side has been great, though Google still wins for many queries, due to personalization. On the other hand Google also fails for me on many searches by being "clever" compared to its functionality a decade ago and assuming I've made a typo or are searching for something I've not.
On the mobile app side, DDG is a bit frustrating though. About 5% of sites have major issues. Probably the worst is Indie Hackers, where I simply can't log in. After hitting oauth, a blank page with a Firebase URL comes up and I'm still not logged in. Fortunately most sites with oauth-based login don't have this issue on DDG but enough do that it's annoying.
Very consistent growth since 2014.
As I'm building a product or doing some other imperitive job, I'm not focused on privacy (other than the fact that I put on AlgoVPN and switch between my VPNs often) than getting results that fix bugs or genuinely help me.
Sometimes when I'm searching pretty vague/generic queries I go to DDG because there's a ton of websites that hack their SEO to the top and DDG alleviates that.
As Google recently rolled out its horrible UI I may go to DDG a bit more, but at the end of the day I just need good search results, regardless of which platform (which both engines provides, but based on if the query is generic or not)
For instance, search for any late model car and you'll find a slew of websites like 2020-make-model.com or 2021modelmake.com etc. These sites look like they're all generated from a similar template with minor changes, with some real pictures along with short poorly written articles that are completely useless, at best they're speculative. They're just good enough to get into the top search results but don't actually provide consumers with any useful information.
Sounds to me that the 400 sources and their own crawler are used for Instant Answers, while all their "traditional links" come from Bing and Verizon.
Otherwise it's getting better and better. I have replaced the Google search bar on Android by the DDG one and I notice less and less the difference in quality, while I love searching anything without the feeling it will affect my Google profile account.
I'm impressed by DDG's search results for non-English queries. I remember it was almost unusable in Japanese a couple of years ago. It's not bad now even in Japanese, although there is an obvious overwrap with Bing's results if I compare using the same query.
Still can't get away from "Pizzerias around me" style queries on G + not expecting DDG to take these up anytime soon, as they are probably like 10% of my search queries per day anyways.
Does your answer change when you consider that Google gave the duck.com domain to DDG a few months ago?
If that does not change your opinion, why would a competitor that controls a rather pivotal assets like an extremely valuable domain like duck.com to what is presented as a competitor to Google?
Also no, they don't produce the same results. Google is becoming useless.
That was my turning point
I guess the rest of the social media marketing as well is just another benefit of being nice to your power users.
New Google SERPs are insulting to me as a user.
If/when they do I'll happily drop them and start promoting another one.
But for now that is only hypothetical. The problems with Google exist right now.