Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo grew by 46% in 2021

For day to day searching i use duckduckgo by default on every device. Not a lot because of privacy, something about that company ticks me off in terms of privacy.

I like duckduckgo’s interface and I feel they genuinely put a lot of effort to ensure people have a great experience using their search engine.

Whether its their !bang feature or integration with apple maps or their various themes. (Heck even their no js, search engine option is very cool too).

In terms of quality of links and interesting content, i havent come across a search engine better then marginalia[0] for that. But then i search for weird stuff, so who knows.

[0](https://search.marginalia.nu/)

I switched to DDG in 2017 on desktop and in 2019 on mobile. I still revert 1 in 500 searches back to Google since the results aren’t as good.

That said, I wouldn’t trade better results to lose the benefit of increased privacy.

I also use PI Hole to block tracking at the network level, use UBlock Origin at the browser level, and use Mozilla containers on Firefox to silo my social media accounts so they can’t track my browsing as easily.

Most people don’t do these things.

I switched my default to DDG about a year and a half ago after what I assume was am A/B test that filled the first 3 screen lengths with various Google Widgets, and 90% of the first page results were links to Google products which for the search query was not especially useful. And that's with ads blocked. I've been bothered by Google's business practices for a long time, and have switched to Firefox as completely as possible, but I'm still tied to Android. For some very specific searches Google is still better at surfacing good results. But even when Google results are really good I usually have to scroll past so much first party feature lard that the experience is taxing.

I havent had the need for Google Search as much anymore. I find that the content is lower quality and truly useful information is hard to find.

If I need a product review I use YouTube or Reddit search.

I increasingly use Github search for code.

I use Google Maps for restaurant or store location/hours, then go to the linked website from there.

I use wiki search (Firefox prefix) to find quick information on a topic.

I use imdb search (Firefox prefix) for movies/show information.

And so on.

Ten years ago my internet experience would start from Google Search, now its a lot more diverse.

DDG is my default on my devices, but at this point I've just defaulted to !g-ing every search query just because of how often DDG is not up to the mark.

I like the convenience of those Google quick answer box excerpts. And DDG is TERRIBLE for anything remotely regional, and I don't expect it to be fixed anytime in the next decade because I currently live in what's technically a third-world country, so I doubt they'll allocate any resources towards fixing it.

Essentially at this point I only use DDG for the bangs. !g for web search, and others for everything else.

Yes, Google search results have been getting worse. But in my experience, they're still better than anything else out there.

Has anyone else had a similar experience?

Even though I don't use their browser, I've found brave search to be able to filter out a lot of the blog spam for simple programming languages compared to ddg and even google, has anyone else made similar observations?

Not surprising. I also migrated after ixquick/startpage started their aggressive monetisation efforts earlier this year.

Frankly, the results are bad. Always have been for me. If it's still powered by bing, that would explain it because it assumes everyone is somewhere in North America. Still beats having to deal with Google, though

I always question myself about how much DDG can improve theirs results until the Bing backend becomes the problem.

I switched to DuckDuckGo gradually a few years ago, starting on iOS. I was fed up with Amp pages in Google search results—using DDG made them go away. As some other commenters have mentioned, for some queries it’s painfully obvious how bad the DDG results are, and for things like sports results it’s super convenient to have those Google embeds. But the vast majority of my searches go through DDG, and it’s fine. It’s nice that when I search for say some specific car model, I don’t start seeing YouTube recommended videos about reviews for that car later in the day (unless I explicitly search on YouTube).

I noticed several billboard ads for duckduckgo in my town since last year. Over the years, they also made their message clear, it is all about privacy, not bangs, not applets, or anything else duckduckgo is also good at.

I don't know how they advertise in other media but clearly, there is a serious marketing campaign going on, and it looks successful. That can explain the growth.

Google search on iOS Safari prompts me to install Google app for every search. This alone drove me nuts and I switched to DDG.

Does any one know if statcounter’s data skews any way for the data to be biased in any way? Duck Duck Go on pace to surpass Yahoo at some point in 2022 and not be too far behind Bing is pretty wild to me.

Perhaps Bing’s lack of market share is what is more surprising but should not be. Duck Duck Go’s share makes sense. And for Yandex to round out the top 6 at 0.08%. A decade ago AOL and Ask.com still had some relevancy.

Also, I wonder if there are any countries outside Russia, Belarus, Turkey, South Korea (technically North Korea too), Japan, and China, where Google doesn’t have at least 80% market share. Or another search engine with at least 5% market share like Vietnam just getting to that.

I really wish FRAND search APIs were mandated. This would enable new companies to compete on privacy and UX, and even make partly-FOSS solutions viable.

Probably won’t happen unless/until Google angers enough legislators, so for now I’m trying Neeva. The iOS browser is still very much Beta quality, but the search experience has been pretty good.

Not seeing ads has been refreshing, but I wish there was a way to say “don’t show this website in search results” and sync that across devices. Even better, let users vote on what’s relevant and high-quality, rather than let websites play the SEO game.

There is no privacy with DDG because it pulls content in, so the search results show the website icon so its possible to workout what you are searching for in general terms from the icons that get displayed.

when you consider how many websites exists, those general terms dont take much to work out, plus its mainly powered by Bing so Bing needs to know what you are searching in order to deliver the right results.

Really surprised people on here thought DDG was private though.

Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo is based and hosted in the U.S., and thus subject to U.S. court-and-gag orders. Just something to be aware of.

Neeva is another option for privacy minded folks. Plus it is ad free, and Neeva is also much more than just a wrapper around Bing results.

Disclaimer: I work on Neeva :)

I tried using DDG as the default for everything, but I consistently get inferior results, especially when I use `site:` searches. (I append `site:reddit.com` to many of my searches). I want to use DDG, but having to use `!g` so often really puts a wet blanket on the idea.

I don't use DDG because it just uses Yahoo under the hood. I tried to find a link but seems to be deleted by a DDG bot on redit and the page on their own site declaring the news has been overwritten. It's just Yahoo in a trenchcoat targeting the #1 concern with Google with some new marketing slogans.

I used DDG in 2015-2018. Now switched to Qwant. Unlike DDG, it's not US-based. It's also faster, because they have their own index, and need not to go to Bing for search results. Search quality is better, in my subjective opinion.

After self-hosting whoogle, I never look back. It’s still google but with a lot of junk removed. Sometimes I have to use yandex though, Google’s results are censored and politically biased anyway.