- 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.