DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries
duckduckgo.com
duckduckgo.com
Content costs money, and if I don’t want ads, I need to pay the difference. I where a little surprised to see Linus Tech Tips break down they income and showing that Youtube Premium as significant source of revenue.
I remember trying to get the Guardians of the Galaxy awesome mix, and it only had a youtube video with all songs glued together. Also, it was a bit weird experience overall because they matched so many random videos
My other hunch is that it would make the non ad-free experience greatly cheapened in the eyes of the consumer, in the same way youtube with ads feels different after experiencing youtube premium.
They’re betting they can get more out of advertisers than paying subscribers.
YouTube in the browser has almost all features of the app now, so there's no compelling reason to use the YouTube app.
The irony is that I was a Google Play Music subscriber until its death but in my country you still had the Youtube ads.
Why is this good? For me personally, both FB and Google figured out that I'm into home renovation and all they keep recommending me is relevant stuff. So I consider it free research done for me :) Contractors, webshops, pretty images are all over my feed.
I even press accept cookies for webshops I want to see more of their competition :)
Saving money instead of being manipulated to buy something I otherwise wouldn't is good for me and the environment.
I have extensions that remove suggested videos on the sidebar, homepage, and during the video; as well as ads, comments, and product recommendations. I use YT in a Firefox container without an account that is separate from my other Google container.
With it you can associate domains with containers and tell Firefox to always open them in a container. It will also automatically un-containerize if you follow a link to a third party domain. Basically how I expect containers to work.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Some examples of things I personally thing DDG could improve / is different then Google:
- DDG gives the feeling they prefer wikipedia over stack overflow. Stack overflow ranks often second.
- GLSL shaders. DDG does not index websites such as shadertoy. Example search for "Gold Noise Uniform Random"
- indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video. Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so I searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos only photos and articles. Google found a few videos including once on a dutch news website.
- Visual search and reverse image lookup is not that great. Only in Bing you can search for a video based on a image DDG and Google both can not do that. So both could improve that.
- DDG sometimes gives the feeling not enough people have searched for something, This feeling is more a feeling then a real thing. This is mostly because Google finds a lot of spelling / typo's in your search query and DDG appears to only repairs it until it contains valid words. Example search for "A apple a day keps the", Google corrects AN and KEEPS but DuckDuckGo only corrects KEEPS.
- Old websites are not indexed that well. Example if you are developing a gameboy advance game it takes a while before you find Tonc (one of the best resources regarding GBA development). With google this experience is terrible as well but it takes less time to find some good things.
I am the same, but i default to !sp (startpage.com) first.
They claim:
> You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs. [...]
But yes, i know. I still use it, because i trust those guys to have a good-enough judgement on this. https://blog.privacytools.io/relisting-startpage/
Maybe they're not perfect, but i'm convinced they are a hell lot better than submitting my data to Google. ;)
Not just spell check but Google understands natural language queries, too, better than duck.com.
Ex A:
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/search?q=the%20movie%20wher...
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the%20movie%20where%20...
If I know that I am searching a YouTube video, I usually search directly on youtube.com. I use Firefox search keywords for this, I just type "yt Rick Astley Never" in my top bar and instantly see the results. Pretty sure Chromium et al. should have something similar...
While I have an insider: I see a lot of mentions in the threads about folks who use "!g" or "!sp" -- are those counted as votes of suboptimal DDG results? I could see it going either way: it's a bad metric for those users who just default to doing it, but it's a good metric for searches that end in the frustration of a series of bad DDG results
When I search "transformer" in ddg I get the movie franchise, when I do it in Google I get the ones you see hanging on utility poles. Google knows I look at power electronics. When I search "voltage transformer" in ddg I get the same quality results as google.
Are they ambiguous? Are they paraphrasing the error description?
Because for me, most of the time, I just paste the error message into DDG, and the relevant Stack Overflow answer, not question page, the actual answer, is in DDG search results for me to use and fix my problem.
This is actually one of my favourites DDG features, along with currency conversion.
Every time I use !g I'm reminded just how bad it's gotten. Between the SEO spam and ads I find myself scrolling at least halfway down the page to find anything even remotely relevant. I can't say that DDG always has the 'best' results, but at least they seem appropriate to what I'm searching for.
One thing I do wish DDG has is webmaster tools. I know they don't do their own indexing, but it would be nice to have a way to get performance & keyword data the way Google/Bing/Yandex etc present it.
Me: "I don't see what I expected. I'll try Google."
Me two seconds later 9 out of 10 times: "Oh, Google also sucks for this query. Oh well."
"What are people not finding on our engine?"
grep -F '!g' logYou can do this on Firefox, by adding bookmarking google.com and adding 'g' as a keyword. But there's no way to manage your keywords/search engines, and even adding it is more involved than on chrome/edge
Lucky for me ;)
[1] I made a small add-on for firefox which tracks DDG usage and lists the usage stat.
If DDG has such severe memory-related side effects, I'm not sure I want to switch.
I called up my siblings and asked, "where did you get this email address, why are you emailing me here?" And they just said, "what are you talking about, you've always been on Fastmail." I have no idea what's going on. Sometimes I'll go to update my system, and I'll be using Pacman instead of the normal Debian package manager. Then the next day it will switch back. Sometimes I'll search for things online, and I won't find the result I'm looking for, but then a day later I'll get a physical letter in my mailbox with the answer to my question written on it.
So anyway, long story short, I decided to switch Bing instead and so far that's had only minor side effects.
I do many technical searches throughout the day, and ddg falls short basically every time. Google is always closer to the mark with my search intent, with for example, deep links to stack overflow answers that ddg misses.
I use DDG 100% of the time, and maybe retry on another search engine a couple times per month.
There's clearly some difference, but I don't know what it is:
- Search topic (my searches are mostly tech-related, but other family members are also happy on DDG)
- Query style (I may be a bit literal/keyword-inclined, but others are more conversational)
- Location?
As a next step you could try out entirely different platforms. I personally find Peertube very appealing, because it federates with ActivityPub, which I already use and love. There's also LBRY, but I don't get how it works, so no opinion on that. It seems to have more well known publishers on it though.
¹ AFAIK they don't (may not?) have an official instance. But there is a public list here: https://github.com/iv-org/documentation/blob/master/Invidiou...
At blekko, under high traffic, we would loadshed obvious bot traffic first and prioritize searches from humans.
Wonder what a human-centric 'search' experience will look like in 2025... no more search bar, pre-emptive article fetch based on whatever some ML algorithm decides for you?
It'll just happen to be what you needed at the right time.
Would syndication search services, like DDG or Startpage, see a higher level of bot traffic than a crawler search engine? We don't know and it could depend on several factors. Bot traffic handling is certainly an ongoing and important challenge.
Example: there is a mobile network named Three in both the UK and Ireland. With the Ireland location toggle enabled, the search “Three network coverage” places the Irish Three (three.ie) in fifth position, under four .co.uk results.
I’m at the point where if I need to search something that could be location dependant I throw a !g onto the search term by default.
I am actually surprised it is only 100M per day. I think it would be much bigger if there was actual fair competition.
BTW, I DDGed for the last 2 years and never been happier. They have improved tremendously
I've had a different experience, I prefer being able to choose the location. For technical queries it gives me better results, for general queries less SEO'ed content and when I want something local I change the switch. Bonus is that I can choose a different location, which has been useful this year because my travel pattern has changed to staying at a remote location for longer periods - I can still easily get my home country results when I need them without trying all sorts of extra keywords.
If you’re on the fence... it’s literally free and completely painless to switch out the default search engine in every browser I have used at least, I recommend trying it out!
Things just feel, cleaner this way. Still a long way to go
A search engine, router level ad-blocker, browser-based adblocker and messaging app do not replace a public messageboard or a pseudo-public/pseudo-private messageboard/events service.
Actually maybe "unbound" is that because there's a bunch of projects with that name, so who knows.
That's no different than flipping a coin and hoping for heads. You normally flip with your right hand, but when it comes up tails you try again with your left. About half the time, your left succeeds where your right fails, therefore your left hand is better at flipping coins. I'm sure there's a name for that bias? (Notice that you could do it in reverse and draw the reverse conclusion - the same goes for Google and DDG.)
To actually compare them, you'd need to do the same searches on both, not just the ones where DDG did poorly.
I find myself using the !g at times when I can tell that the search didn't work as well as what I've seen on Google, but it's become much less frequent.
And yes, me too - I do love DDG, very happy user.
What I dont like is the amount of captchas Google makes me solve (perhaps because I dont use Chrome or keep my Google account open)
I also use "!a" and "!yt" all the time as well.
Do you see this reflected in higher user numbers coming from DuckDuckGo over time?
I run a website too. Let me check the stats...
So according to Google Analytics over the last 30 days, 0.7% of my visitors came from DDG. Not bad. That is more then half of Bing, from which 1.2% of my visitors come.
Over time, the DuckDuckGo trend does not look as exponential as in their chart though. More like a linear growth that about doubled from early 2019 to now. But that could be due to many factors of course. Blocked analytics being one.
>1k - Google
65 - DDG
20 - Bing
6 - Startpage
1 - Yandex
38.6% direct
1.44% bing
0.34% startpage
0.3% ecosia
0.27% DDG
But I feel like non-google users are more likely to block GA, so these stats are probably skewed.
Just checked the stats for our startup:
December:
Google 5.3k visitors
DDG 589 visitors
Bing 57 visitors
This month it looks a bit closer:
Google 2.8k
DDG 378
Bing 36
Bing - 1.8%
DDG - 1.0%
Yahoo - 0.8%
This time last year: Google 89%, Bing 6%, DDG 1.9%, Yahoo 1.9%.
1. Google (82.75%) 2. Direct (6.33%) 3. Bing (3.63%) 4. DuckDuckGo (1.85%) 6. Yahoo (0.94%)
Kind of upsetting that as of January 1st my website was delisted from Bing + DuckDuckGo for no apparent reason meaning that my traffic is down by 5%. If anyone has any contacts within the Bing team I'd be really interested to know why my site was removed.
A particularly common result on DDG which bugs me is whenever I'm searching for something which I'm positive will be answered on Stack Overflow the first page of results includes one Stack Overflow question and the rest of the results are from other sites. This can be annoying when the search is basically "how to convert X to Y", and the only Stack Overflow result is "how to convert Y to X". The similar results for each site shown on Google is a killer app in these situations, and is probably the main reason I "!g".
Each time I find myself going back to Google as it frequently surfaces the result I'm looking for on the first page.
At what point did google search go from that great search engine to what amounts to an ad landing page full of spam. Sundar keeps trying to go into other markets rather than weeding the garden already sown, and its not going to end well.
I always browse in Private mode, so switching the session to light mode is totally unhelpful.
I wonder if anyone else runs into this and found a workaround?
* Search
* Scroll the tabs bar (All, Images, Shopping, etc) all the way to the rightmost entry, "Search Tools"
* Tap "Search Tools"
* A secondary menu bar with "ANY TIME \/" will appear. You can use that to filter by date-range.Overall using two search engines provides solid results with DDG being my main engine.
It was cool to see DDG browser app in the top 20 iPhone apps this week!
It sounds minor but I find it a hard domain to type for trying out a search (when google isn't giving me what I want), whereas if it was ddg.com I'd probably jump to it more as an alternative. Maybe I am just incredibly lazy, though.
I think most people are even lazier then you. They don't type domain names at all. They set their default SE to duckduckgo.com and then search via the url bar.
That being said the biggest drawback is if my wife uses my phone to search for something she grumbles at me.