DuckDuckGo's daily search queries surpassed 100M, a 47% increase | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo's daily search queries surpassed 100M, a 47% increase

en.brinkwire.com

179 pointsthunderbong99 comments

The linked article is just a thin, poor-quality rewrite of a Bleeping Computer article which was discussed here two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29696812

Thanks for this, I was wondering why every sentence was its own paragraph.

I don't think it's even a rewrite. It looks like algorithmically-generated blogspam. Look at the conspicuously capitalized "DuckDuckGo Mac Version Coming Soon" line, and the flipped header image.

I'm not sure if HN bans whole domains or not, but this seems like one to ban.

I think you're right! The first story on https://en.brinkwire.com, in the "Sports" category, is "The date when the Sun will completely burn out has been revealed – and this is what will occur."

But more directly, their about-us page (https://en.brinkwire.com/about-us/) states:

  Denial of responsibility!

  Brinkwire is a semi-automated aggregator around the global media. All content is freely available on the internet. We have compiled them on one platform for educational purposes only and we add value to them by not copying directly. For each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is provided.

Which seems to be an outright lie so yes, I hope this whole domain can get the banhammer since it's garbage wasting everybody's time.

They appear to use ad tracking, i. e. this is a commercial operation and not an "educational" one

I went to set DDG on all my devices a few months ago because it was the "right" thing to do but expecting to get inferior results and needing to use the g bang a lot, surprisingly it turns out I never had to use it. Ordinary search has changed with the siloization of the internet: twitter, subreddits, stackow, github, official pages, all the big silos are easy to find and offer superior internal discovery, the fact that google might (or not) be better at ranking the long tail is losing relevance fast.

Same here. DDG is also superior if you are searching for controversial information which Google bans.

I find image search to be almost entirely useless but the normal search is generally sufficient. The last time I used DDG the geographic results were frustratingly inconsistent. I’d get restaurants in different countries and whatnot.

Actually when you are searching for something to print (like coloring pages) DDG is much more useful as you can actually open the image as an image. Google seems to have stopped doing that.

I’m not a big fan of leeching people’s content like that. Though it’s very convenient for the consumer.

I agree, and probably I may buy more coloring books if it weren’t for ddg. Although we have many and still my daughter wants a specific one with a unicorn and a princess and spends a lot of time picking one. The alternative to this is “take on from you coloring books you already have.” So I guess nobody is really losing anything in this case, except me, I pay for the toner in the printer as well as for the coloring books ;)

I do the exact same with my kids. I’m not “innocent” of my own perspective either. :)

> I’m not a big fan of leeching people’s content like that. Though it’s very convenient for the consumer.

Except the internet was built to let us leech content from eachother.

If there would have been a capitalistic mindset behind it, I guess they would have started with taking your credit card number back in 1960.

Whatever you think the Internet was built for doesn’t matter. Copyright exists and some people want to retain their rights to share an image without people just wholesale scraping it without even visiting the website.

This antisocial behaviour of walking in and taking whatever isn’t bolted down leads to an unfortunate arms race of watermarks, other technologies, and crappy laws that attempt to stop consumers from disrespecting the rights of producers.

Whether intended or not, Google at least makes you visit the website before taking the images. (Which is contrary to all the times google does this for its own benefit.)

The number of people who produce desirable content are drastically outnumbered by the number of consumers, so I’m very guarded about any rhetoric that fixates on consumer rights at the cost of producer rights. Naturally they don’t get an equal voice.

It's been my experience that Google has heavily deranked or outright delisted the long tail anyway. Almost all results are either major media sites, reddit, github, similar large sites, or blogspam. Older sites are often outright delisted, newer sites usually just have some sort of huge deranking penalty that often makes their results unfindable, unless you are able to search for an exact quote on that site. It's really bizarre, there are a TON of extremely valuable content-rich niche sites out there that are far better than, for example, the Wikipedia treatment of their subject, but Google search hates them.

I am actually quite puzzled by what they choose to index now or not - for example, you'll find that a lot - but not all - of HN comment pages are not indexed or delisted.

So it really doesn't seem surprising to me that Google search can fairly easily be beaten nowadays.

EDIT: Well, in my quest for an example of a delisted HN comment page, which I have run into before, I found something even more curious: a page that does appear in the index if I search by title, but not if I search by some of the page contents (eg site:news.ycombinator.com my username and the word 'eliding') reflected in the Google cached version of the webpage.

EDIT2: I checked on DDG and searching on site:news.ycombinator.com for amezarak eliding does turn up the comment that Google can't find.

That’s 1.7% of Google’s search volume, which is actually very impressive when you consider the grip Google has on search.

Google search product as become progressively worse each year.

DDG is not much better, I dont believe there is any good search product out there right now, however for technical topics I often find DDG easier to find things from actual manual pages, or Knowledge bases where Google I just get lost of Marketing Blogs trying to sell me something

The ironically exception to this is some time Microsoft own documentation is harder to find on DDG (which is backed by bing) than on google... I think that largly has to do with MS terrible choice to remove technet, and break 50% of their links on the internet.

I've noticed that I've come to rely more and more on the expandable "Similar Questions" entries in Google, which contain text snippets with the answers to those questions and the linked document which is providing this text.

Search engines without it feel pretty static, like what you get is what you see, and in order to improve your search you need to issue a new one.

google seems to go out of its way to exclude results that match exact wording these days, even with quotes. this is incredibly frustrating, especially for technical searches. i halfheartedly switched to ddg a few years ago but it has become much more earnest in the last year. google is now run by committee or something.

I agree. The only thing that irks me with DDG is that it ranks the official python docs too low. I often end up with results from w3school which I don't want to use. And unfortunately I can't remove domains from the search results.

Yes. It would be pretty cool if we could include a blocked-site list saying "please exclude these sites from my search results."

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/97983/permanentl...

There is a workaround to blacklist certain results using an extension in conjunction with a script for it.

Woot! Super cool. Thank you. That like also refers to https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist. Will check them out.

I've added a keyword search bookmark in my Firefox recently, makes it search in 'verbatim' mode, yields slightly more reasonable results

"https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1"

Great to see DDG growing steadily. I've been using it on all of my devices for going on four years and it's proven to be an enjoyable experience. Their extensive collection for !Bangs, in particular, has proven beyond useful for quick and easy searches in a single location.

I have all my devices default to DDG except one, and honestly for 98% of searches I don't notice (it's been over a year now).

I do still pull out a !g for weird software related searches that DDG seems to interpret wrong or only return a few foreign language results for.

Its lightness is why I use ddg on my mobile and desktop. https://html.duckduckgo.com/html is light, while https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite is even lighter.

I switched to HTML DDG for a week and the search results are worse than the normal version. I had to switch back after a week even though I was really enjoying the lightweight experience.

I notice now that you point it out, but most of my searches are straight forward so I never paid much attention.

I presume this is the cause (not entirely) of their advertising campaign they did in London recently. Couldn't find a source only a reddit post[0]. They were on buses, the underground and in train stations.

Any other city recently get them as well?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/qyss8g/spotted_...

All over Seattle. Also have been seeing them more and more often online. “Hey we’re following you around the internet to insist that we don’t track you” has been rubbing be the wrong way a lot recently. I stick with Bing.

We have them in Texas too. I’ve seen several in Austin and even one in Brownsville, a smaller city close to the Mexico border.

There has been a radio advertising campaign for DDG here in SF Bay Area recently.

Same thing here in the Greater Boston Area.

They are blasting billboards in Salt Lake City.

Portland, OR has them on billboards and the radio. I'm assuming they're everywhere at this point.

The main reason I use DGG instead of Google is to avoid the "Before you continue to Google Search" dialog.

Gets really annoying if you use a browser that doesn't save cookies

All major browsers have supported cookies for decades.

All is not all major. Plus, some people just set their major browser not to save cookies across sessions.

all is a superset of all major !?

Socrates is a mortal and hamsters are mortal, but Socrates is not a hamster. All major are part of all, but being part of all does not mean that you are all major, hence all are not all major. :)

All is all major. All major may not be all. Sorry, I see that I'm being a semantics troll :)

What if you're in a private/incognito window and want to look up something?

I switched to DDG even though the search results are not as good as Google's.

And not for privacy reasons either.

The reason I switched is that it has become too cumbersome to get english results from Google.

In the past I went to google.com/ncr and was good to go.

Nowadays I 1) go to google.com/ncr then 2) Need click away their cookie banner and 3) have to go to google.com/ncr again.

If I only go to google.com/ncr and click away the cookie banner, I still get results based on my location. For example, when I google "tradingview nasdaq", I want www.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-NDX/ - I don't want <localizedsubdomain>.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-NDX/

With DDG, I just go to duck.com and I am good to go.

So if anyone from Google reads this - this is the reason you lost me.

Google is insanely moronical nowadays. I use YouTube's English interface (do they have localized interfaces?), watching videos in the language of the country where I currently reside. After a while I noticed the titles were in English although the people were talking in the local language. I figured out YouTube was auto-translating them... is there a setting to disable this? Nope.

A while ago it was doing the reverse, translating all video titles to the local (where I live) language. I was watching American gaming content but the titles were in a different language. Fuck you very much, YouTube.

I used DuckDuckGo yesterday specifically because it doesn't redirect you if it detects you are using Internet Explorer.

I had an underpowered corporate laptop that's MS Edge session was too bloated, but didn't have the ability to add any extensions that would facilitate managing and saving that session. So when it had a BSOD as I was trying to run a heavy application on it simultaneously, I was determined not to run both MS Edge and this heavy app at the same time.

But then, I had to Google something...

Internet Explorer to the rescue! Except if you want to access Google, that is. If you go to it, then you'll be redirected to Microsoft, and then they'll automatically launch MS Edge. Now I have to choose between googling my question, running that damn app, and risking loosing my previous session if the laptop has another BSOD before I click on the "Restore" button.

Out of curiosity, I tried accessing DuckDuckGo in IE. Not only did it work fine, but there was also no silly redirect.

For my service, DDG traffic[1] is currently 50% of Google's, which is quite impressive. This is not a representative niche of course, but still good to see.

1: https://twitter.com/borg_base/status/1474807112282906627

Not only is 50% not representative of the whole it also doesn’t seem to be representative of your own data. Looks like DDG is not even 40% of Google’s traffic according to the link you shared.

Let's call it "around 50%". :-) This is just one day from one site. I didn't calculate in detail, but was surprised that it was as high as that around most sites (some docs sites, control panel, etc)

Doesn't Google do 5.6 billion searches a day?

"How many Google searches per day? Google doesn't share its search volume data. However, it's estimated Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year."

I switched to DDG after I got tired of Google’s too results being curated content. I just want to see what matches my search, not what Alphabet wants me to see.

I may never understand the apparent interest by a subset of HN users for this reskin of Bing.

Originally it was basically a reskin of Bing, but now it has many sources and its own crawler.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

I'm sure that's technically true, but I haven't seen any meaningful difference in the results vs. Bing for the queries I've tried.

There may be a huge number of sources, but DDG results are still heavily influenced by Bing.

Because Bing makes no promises on privacy, has worse UI/UX, is owned by a generally looked-down-on company when it comes to anything related to privacy or user-choice.

Who owns DDG and what happens if they’re successful enough that Google buys them?

Since they use Bing data, I doubt this will happen although I think the case for Apple buying them instead is very strong.

/wishful_thinking

Google will buy them just to shut them down. Doesn’t matter that it uses Bing data.

This is not allowed in the US.

Every time I see DDG results in Bulgarian when I search in Russian I first get annoyed at how uncomplicated its search logic is (don't you see where my request is coming from?), but then I am kinda relieved it doesn't try to use anything except my own search keywords.

I prefer DDG over Google because I seem to encounter less SEO blogspam, but I wonder how long it'll be before such blogspam is tuned for both. Ideally there are conflicting parameters that would make it difficult to game both search engines for any ambiguous query.

Also, this article mentions DuckDuckGo's email protection service, which some (like me) may be unfamiliar with. Seems like a proxy for incoming email that strips trackers, pretty neat: https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/20/22576352/duckduckgo-email...

How do they monetize or finance the massive operation? I hope it does not turn out to be the same.

Pretty sure their results are just forwards of Bing, so not sure the operation is as massive as you might be thinking. DDG still shows ads, they just don't use tracking.

There is more to the results than bing, that is a large component though

These days they use lots of sources in addition to Bing.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

For their "instant answers". The link results are basically bing.

You can switch ads off in settings.

They run ads based on keywords, not the person doing the search. They also earn revenue as an affiliate. (You click an amazon link and make a purchase. They earn a small commish off of it) I've been using duck for awhile now.

Though, you can turn off the ads[1], which makes all the difference.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/settings

They're making more than $100mm a year via ads and have been profitable since 2014 according to this Techcrunch article: https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/16/on-a-growth-tear-duckduckg...

They use Bing's ad network (or at least they used to) and don't expose any privacy details about their users, so advertisers can't target you based on demographic or psychographic information.

Didn’t know that! Sounds like a better monetisation strategy with user in mind.

DuckDuckGo publishes daily traffic metrics themselves here: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

Would be nice to a get a breakdown on the market share of search engines.

Most of the returned results (gstatcounter) don't include DDG.

I’ve been using ddg for years now, ddg (and bing) long passed the good enough threshold for search where I don’t ever feel like something wasn’t found, and I always get a good enough answer for what I was looking for.

It’s possible for other search engines to be technically better, to find more results, or surface the most relevant pages earlier, but it doesn’t matter to me in practice.

Can the (edited) headline be clarified to say that the 47% figure is year-in-year? Otherwise the timelines are not at all clear.

I switched to DDG earlier everywhere this year and, honestly, I've totally forgotten about Google Search. However, I also run pi-hole, and unfortunately, the DDG top results are usually all sponsored and don't work, due to pi-hole. I don't begrudge DDG the click revenue, but I haven't spent time trying to set the whitelist rules.

That's funny ... I haven't noticed this problem. I don't run pi-hole, I use uBlock with some customizations so I'm guessing I'm just not seeing the sponsored links at all.

I killed all text/image ads after an accidental click on a non-intrusive ad a decade ago infected my work laptop and haven't looked back. I'm going to turn it back on for DDG and just "be careful". Hopefully this is less of a problem in 2021, and hopefully it's not a problem at all on DDG, but the ad I clicked by accident was on a mainstream, non-porn/traditionally risky site ... it was a flash exploit, though, so at least that's gone given my configuration.

With their privacy focus, does that mean they don't track and keep a list of database queries being made? I'm quite curious to what people may be searching at DDG vs. say Google - it certainly feels like there'd be important societal insights possible with that data. If they do compile it, do they publish this data anywhere?

From their privacy policy [0]:

> We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings.

It's not clear how long they keep these searches.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/privacy#s4

Thanks.

I highly doubt they would every release it, though. Search history, even if aggregated, will undoubtedly contain some level of private data submitted my accident.

While google generally gives me the best results for specific queries I have grown very very tired of the amount of ads I sometimes see. Recently I hit a search that gave me 5 ads at the top, 3-4 actual results and more ads on the bottom. It was both sad and amazing to see more ads than actual search results.

Use ublock origin then

No thanks.

I set DDG as my default search engine in Vivaldi on my phone a year or so ago. I've now developed the habit of typing 'g' (in Vivaldi you do not have to type the '!') in front of all my queries, even when using other desktop browsers. I guess that for me DDG is just not there yet.

DDG should just add a "!g button" at the bottom of their first results page.

That will make people switch. I know it will make me switch.

I was doing exactly the same thing for the last several years (Firefox, not Vivaldi, but "g" is configured for Google). Sometimes I'd slip on the space and it'd go to DDG.

This happened a few months ago after I'd spent hours trying to find the right incantation to get Google to give me something other than a bunch of troubleshooting that I'd already done. The DDG page had much of the same, but the top link was bizarre in its irrelevance to my query. I don't know if it was the two hours of frustration that led me to click it[0] or that the title also included a service that my application used, but one I had (in error) ruled out as the culprit.

It turned out to be the exact solution I needed.

Here's my assessment:

  - DDG falls down for queries that are seemingly simple but require context beyond the term to get the result I'm specifically looking for.  Google knows too much about me, so if I search for a technology company by name, and it shares a name with seven other businesses, DDG won't put it on top unless that tech company ranks higher than the others using their privacy respecting search.  Google will have it as the first link, with a sidebar explaining things that might keep me from needing to click it.

  - DDG performs as well or better (in a lot of cases *better*) than both Bing (I think the major source of its search data) and Google for queries seeking programming/troubleshooting/other technical help.  It surfaces results that don't show at all on Google for me.  Its results for these queries contain fewer spammy responses, as well, for reasons unknown.

That last point was surprising to me mainly because ... Google has all of my context and a massive team of people who are supposed to be ensuring my results are excellent. DDG is working with so much less, yet they're providing me better results often enough that it seems they've got some things implemented that exceed Google's capabilities. I'm not sure if that's the case or if it's just coincidence, but it's happening enough (now that I'm giving them a chance and looking) that I'm happy with the outcome.

Give it a shot, next time. You may find, like I did, that it works really well for a lot more than it has in the past.

[0] Details at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29725919

I made the switch two years ago and I must say that it works well enough for me. I use the `bangs` once in a while for Google (!g) or Wolfram Alpha (!wa) when it doesn't cut it, and I assume DDG sees those, and hopefully uses them to improve their search results.

Once made DuckDuckGo my default search engine in all browsers. Ended up switching to Google every time I needed to search in Ukrainian.

I like DuckDuckGo, but its inferior search quality for some non-English languages makes it unusable. Majority of people don't search in English.

A few thoughts here:

- That's a pretty small number compared against Google, but that's not the point. I'm a little impressed and a little skeptical. More on that later.

- OT: The whole "every sentence is a paragraph thing" increases that skepticism, but I realize it just feels like I'm reading something my tweenage son wrote and I need to get over it.

On the skepticism, the number I'm more interested in is how many searches resulted in a link being clicked. If it were possible to get, how many of those searches were not repeated on Google.

The reason I ask is that I have the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension installed[0]. I don't like Google being my default search engine, I prefer search suggestions coming from a search engine that is more respectful of my privacy and have long ago set a shortcut so that starting an address with "g " will perform a Google search.

I often forget the "g " and end up sending that search to DuckDuckGo. For a while, the results returned were nowhere near as helpful as Google and I'd simply repeat the process, inserting the "g "[1].

Lately, however, I think there's combination of "Google's results seem to be getting worse" and "DDG results are getting better" at play -- more recently, I had a horrible problem with Azure AD B2C, performed a search on Google, got pages of relevant-seeming results but all obvious things I had checked/ruled out. DDG had several of those, too, but the top result was a curious article that mentioned another Azure service we used -- KeyStore -- and otherwise seemed totally irrelevant. Mostly due to 2 hours already wasted, I clicked it just to see... well, it turned out that my solution was under Link #1 on DDG.

Since then, I've actually started looking at the results, and most of the time I don't need to redo the search. So I do believe the product is improving, a lot, and they deserve credit for knocking any whole integer percent off of Google.

[0] Like many of you, I am "IT Support" for my extended family. So everyone has Firefox as default and a few extensions, DDG is among them.

[1] I do not use any of the "slash" or special features of DDG. I don't care to learn search syntax and the little bit that I played with that wasn't as helpful as just putting the query into Google. I'm sure it's great and that's on me, but these are 1:1 searches between the engines.

My other favorite search engine next to DDG is https://search.brave.com/.

I try to use these two and only fall back to google in rare occasions these days.

For programming, I still rely on google as my navigational engine, although a search engine that indexed a couple dozen sizes would probably suffice for me.

Great. I hope they are ready to use all that data to close the gap between them and google.

The quality of Google results has dropped substantially in the last week (adding to already poor results). Today I literally couldn't find anything I looked for apart from getting spam and malware dens masqueraded as legitimate sites. DuckDuckGo got me all I needed. Google has become very much unusable...

But DDG still shows Ads? I guess Ads are still ok as long as they are not tracked?

Well, yes. I'm not directly offended by ad-supported free content as such. Especially when the ads are regular low-key banners.

Because previously HN's stand was all ads are bad.

Can be turned off though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com