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DuckDuckGo Traffic

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310 pointseitland224 comments

Been using DDG in Firefox for the past ~5 years or so. About 50% of my searches give me exactly what I'm looking for within the first few results. 20% require a little more digging, maybe adjusting my search terms. 30% are nearly total garbage and I just re-run it with !g. I'm not going to switch though because for the most part it's "good enough" and I want to see that hockey stick trend continue.

I'm usually frustrated with the technical searches the most. If I do something simple like search for "django queryset model update" I will get nearly a full page of SEO spam that's literally just copies of the real django docs site before I even get to the actual docs page. This has gotten somewhat better recently, but it's still not nearly as good as Google. Maybe because Google knows what I click on when I search for these things so it just goes right to it. It's a tradeoff, I guess. Although I do often feel like I'm punishing myself with this.

> I'm usually frustrated with the technical searches the most.

Same, but I’ll usually give DDG a try first. If the search fails you can prepend “!g “ to your query and it’ll redirect you to Google.

"!so " is my new "!g" for technical searches...the sheer difference in spam results is lovely.

Yeah but it kinda defeats the purpose. I mean, I'll give it a try on my private PC but at work where I only google technical stuff I don't see myself switching.

Generally I want my tools to "just work".

Eh, I agree. I default to DuckDuckGo as well, but it's just as a middle finger to Google. It's significantly worse than Google and basically unusable in languages other than English.

Turns out making a search engine is a whole lot of work, I genuinely hope they keep working on it!

> basically unusable in languages other than English.

It works about as good for (simple) French as for English in my experience, but is absolute garbage for Russian—because, I suspect, of all the noun morphology. But, to be fair, the moment Google started becoming comparable to Yandex for Russian was the moment it started to randomly substituting terms in my English searches, like switching “Fréchet space” for “Banach space” in complex queries (they are both things in functional analysis, good job Google, but they are not the same). So looks like it’s either the heavy-handed clustering we hate about the current Google, or difficult linguistic work and tuning for every language in the world.

(Is there a way to stop DDG from ignoring the quotes in my searches? At this point I sometimes get better results from Gigablast than from Google or DDG when searching for a quote.)

I tried to use it but I agree, it’s no where near as good as Google, I don’t like Google ad a company either but I use it because it’s better.

Qwant is another privacy option for European languages at least:

https://lite.qwant.com

> literally just copies of the real django docs site before I even get to the actual docs page

The faster way to get to django docs would be: !dj queryset model update

For python it's !py3

There are thousands of these, and they're awesome.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang?

I fail to see the point of these "bangs" versus resolving them locally (e.g. using firefox keyword bookmarks -- http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.html). Specially if you are using DuckDuckGo which I guess it's for privacy reasons (rather than say quality of results), why would one proceed to send them many more queries than they ought to receive?

Just do these redirections locally and send them to the appropriate site directly, skipping yet another unnecessary and potentially-meddling middleman.

Most damning is !g where both DDG and G get to see your query , offering zero privacy benefit and double the risk.

Setting this up sounds like a tremendous waste of time while DDG has already setup all the bangs for me.

Bangs work anywhere, also on browsers where you cannot use these keywords or on someone else’s computer.

Using !g only DDG can identify you. G would see your query so if you included your SSN etc then they could identify that, but they don’t know your IP etc.

!g redirects to Google, so yes, they get to know these things.

Odd, I just tested it and your right. I tried it before and it had the ddg interface. I wonder if something changed or if I was using the wrong syntax.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

“Remember, though, because your search is actually taking place on that other site, you are subject to that site’s policies, including its data collection practices”

I share your opinion but the reason is convenience: bangs work without any configuration.

I know people who use ddg only for bangs. They do all their web search with Google by prefixing them with !g.

Big firefox user here, but I had never seen the keyword bookmarks thing before. Thanks! I'll try that because yeah I'd love to just have the direct request rather than a redirect.

EDIT: WOW it's right there in the search field when you right click it and choose 'add a keyword for this search' !!!! thanks.

I don't understand why DDG doesn't just hand pick the most popular of these documentation sites and pins them to the top when they show up for a query.

Scale problem? How to do that for 4B sites?

Are there really 4B frameworks or large software projects out there?

I'd argue that simply doing that for the top 10 programming languages or frameworks will make a huge difference and is relatively easy to do. Low effort but very high impact.

Im not sure if I understand this correctly but wouldn’t this prevent other sites from being able to emerge in the future? Basically a forced monopoly on currently popular sites.

We're lamenting the fact that these authentic documentation sites are not the top results, instead being overtaken by bad copycat sites. I'm suggesting not relying on algorithmic improvements to do this and just pinning them to the top, since this is the wanted outcome anyway. The suggestion is not that these pins should be immutable for all time.

I'm not suggesting this be done for commercial sites, just neutral documentation sites for languages and frameworks. This would be strictly better from the perspective of the searcher.

The SEO spam has gotten much worse on DDG the past year or so, they pop on Google every now and then as well. Google on the other hand has a page of ads before the real results. My experience is that if DDG can't find what I'm looking for, then neither can Google, it's just that I'm still much quicker to second guess the results on DDG, compared to Google.

It's a little weird, you'd think that it would be easy to spot the sites that just copy text from Stack Overflow or the Python documentation and drop them from the index entirely, but apparently not.

Googles results top 10 results are usually all ad ridden sites that have a high fluff (ads and banners / dark patterns)

Yeah, the content is there, but with a ton of hoops to jump through.

Guess which search engine also happens to run a web advertising network?

Exactly this. !g is basically evil in more ways than you'll ever know.

The first 3 or 4 a always ads usually. I look for a lot of "best of" and I just automatically click past the first page or two because I know they are going to be SEO spam with some semi honest reviews about something, and another blurb that says the product I'm looking for is thte best.

I've noticed something similar, but I'm not sure if it's SEO spam so much as something that may have changed with their algorithm. I could swear that DDG used to strictly honor wrapping terms in quotes, but now it behaves extremely loosely with quotes, often returning things that contain nothing that was quoted without making it clear if it's doing that because it found no matches. Quotes are kind of a niche feature, but to me the change in behavior likely reflects something that affects all searches.

I think Google and recently DDG think they’re doing me a favour by ignoring my quote marks. They’re not! If they think they only have poor results with quote marks then show me them and tell me that. If they don’t have any results with my quote marks then tell me that. Don’t be embarrassed.

It’s like asking someone in the street for directions and they’re embarrassed they don’t know the way so point you in a random direction. Not helpful!

> It’s like asking someone in the street for directions and they’re embarrassed they don’t know the way so point you in a random direction. Not helpful!

This is an extremely good explanation of what is going on and why it drives me crazy.

I argued this with a search engine employee once and he said others had told him they expected them to do this.

Well, here's the point: If you go this direction the engine become unusable for certain jobs.

If - on the other hand one respect user queries one maybe also have to tell users how to get the results they want.

That is a tradeoff, I admit that. But one of the solutions builds a fantastic tool that might require a tiny tiny bit of training.

The other solution builds a toy that also works as a tool in simple cases.

Why do search engines go that way?

Seems to be short time optimizations all the way:

- making it absolutely idiot proof means more usage

- annoying power users doesn't have any effects until alternatives exist.

Now however Kagi exist and I have left DDG (and Google but they only used to be a fallback anyway) and I will go around tell everyone there is a new search engine in town - and I will enjoy it!

> making it absolutely idiot proof means more usage

Perhaps that's what analysts and management believes publicly within search companies, but I don't think even normies believe that crappy search results is better than none. There's a few things that may be happening that explain why filler search results creates more engagement.

A non-power-user may perceive a search engine that returns crappy results to have more pages indexed over a search engine that returns no results for the same query, even though the latter would return more accurate results for a different query.

Users may also return to the search engine more because they click on these filler results expecting to find what they want, but they don't, so they click on the back button and click on another result. I suspect that analysts may conveniently omit this information when presenting their fancy graphs showing increased engagement to management, and that's because I've seen this sort of shenanigans in real life. Management either way may just not care as long as the ads being displayed in search results are being viewed or clicked more often.

Yeah, DDG has become nearly unusable for me since they stopped honoring quotes (a few months ago?). I've found myself instinctively using the !g Google fallback more often than not, and at that point I might as well just switch back to Google for everything, sigh.

Right. I too feel like this change was very recent. 3 months sounds close to my experience.

I’ve been using DDG for.. 9 years? Something like that. I’ve noticed that too with ignoring the quotes just in the past few months. I don’t know what happened.

Also it seems to sometimes throw in my location information when I didn’t ask.

Since they mainly rely on Bing, maybe Bing has made a change.

I've been experiencing this same thing! If I'm looking for documentation or something I now go straight to Google, where at least it's on the page somewhere. DDG will be pages on pages of blagspam.

> Google on the other hand has a page of ads before the real results.

I've become almost dependant on uBlock Origin for adblocking. Thus this isn't a problem for me but I agree with the general problem.

Have you visited your Gmail inbox lately...

WTF happened? When Google bought Postini, the spam filter got awesome...

Somehow, in the last 12 months - google has been infecting my inbox with spam...

Whats funny is that MANY people used to have yahoo or hotmail dumpsters for spam/sign-ups etc... but now gmail is my spam dumpster, and protonmail is my pref.

---

EDIt: After thinking on it a sec.. I think I know whats up: Inboxing.

Recall how Friendster, HI5, tagged, etc "scaled" -- by being a stupid platform for you to effectively give your details and contacts to so they could scale. Lets not forget what v.01 social media was -- They were all spammers only harvesting email databases... which for ad rev is what built them

Clearly, Google is trying to harvest more ad-rev through killing their spam filter.

Do no evil, much?

It's actually worse than that. They haven't been catching their outgoing spam, either -- I receive tons of spam from fake Gmail accounts these days. So glad that we've all spent billions of hours clicking on buses and traffic lights to convince Google we're humans, when it clearly does nothing to stop botting.

Next version of Captcha: Click the spam subject lines

I found the Firefox extension "Search Filter" [1] to be immensely helpful at combating SEO spam. It allows you to define a list of URL patterns to remove from the search result list altogether, you can use mine as a start for your own if you wish [2].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt...

[2] https://pastebin.com/5MPSHv3w

Thank you for the link. uBlacklist [1] is a more popular alternative, also featured recently on HN [2]

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794372

same, but lately been I've doing technical searches on you.com

I started using DDG around 2011. The progress they made is nothing short of incredible. I've completely switched to them around 2015 or so. I've used Google exactly twice last year. I'm curious what kind of queries yield you 30% garbage results?

I'm not the person you asked, but my experience seems mostly tied to the lack of depth on the indexer they (use/inherit from bing). GitHub issues are #1 on that list, mailing lists and other esoteric backwaters of the Internet are another.

I try very hard to always use the "Report Bad Results" in those circumstances

I agree. I !g for about one search per month; otherwise, garbage results are far less than 30% for me.

When I search for super technical things I sometimes get less relevant results. Also when I remember Something I read years ago and try to find it (in other words it’s not widely linked anymore) I get better results from Google. Not overall I vastly prefer DDG.

DuckDuckGo is awesome, I advocate for DDG as much as I can, and I switched completely a few months ago both on my phone and my PC, but I'm genuinely curious about how you were able to completely switch. Unless you also use the !g command?

I'd love for there to be a "permanent !g" option, because Bing (DDG's default engine) just doesn't cut it. Like, at all. And it's not like I do fancy searches all the time, or ever really. But unless I am searching for a very popular, basic term, most of the time DDG's results either show nothing relevant at all on the first page, or there's one or two results that are relevant, often times the most relevant (like, say, a product page for a product I'm searching for) being shown pretty far down on the page, with third party sites being up top.

In either case, I try !g and immediately find what I'm looking for on the front page. Like it's a whole new world. At this point I am using !g 90% of the time and it gets frustrating; I have half a mind of switching back, but I really don't want to do that, because Google needs to go.

Even when I add "site:xyz.com" or (gag) "site:reddit.com", while DDG's results are better in these cases, just in case I'll try "!g" to see if I missed anything and... bam, even more relevant results I never saw before.

I think Apple needs to enter the search engine business. Bing is just not good enough, and Google is evil. I've moved away from Google Maps, Gmail, Chromecast, and anything else Google I can move away from... but it's the best search engine by far and it's the one instance where it really does make me less productive if I use the alternative.

Why would you need permanent !g, that defeats the purpose of DDG? Use google if you like it so much.

My DDG experience is awesome and Google could die tomorrow for all I care. Not sure if my experience is due to the domains I typically search for though, which are highly scientific/engineering related.

> I think Apple needs to enter the search engine business.

Relevant: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-stay-...

I find that startpage(google) tends to do a bit better with very specific warnings, serial numbers for chips, etc. I get SEO spammers aren't really looking for people who are looking for why an obscure arm processor has just failed.

Any time I get garbage on DDG, the same garbage is on Google with identical query.

Only reason to use Google for me is some extra features like site:xxx (it looks like they added this one to DDG finally).

I am honestly very happy that DDG is so great and I can't stop supporting dark Google patterns.

Here is an example:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=web+worker+message+transferable&t=...

vs actual content on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=web+worker+mess...

Bing is for some reason pretty bad at indexing programming related queries.

Same for me, though for the garbage results I get garbage from Google too. I will agree that it's unusable for Greek, though.

I'd like there to be a "Report blogspam / SEO spam / plagiarism" button in DDG.

Step 1: Click the result...

Step 2: Ugh, swipe back

Step 3: Click "Report poor result" > "SEO spam"

Step 4: Click next relevant link

How would this not be gamed by bots? I see how what you're suggesting would work if there were humans going through and moderating, but I can imagine they would be deluged with millions of reports. Doing it algorithmically is just giving the bad actors a mechanism to sink their competitor's results.

Simple. Enable Captcha! /s

This is the thing people don't get about search. Not only is it incredibly difficult to accurately predict what content will give people exactly what they want, but there is an entire class of bad actors dedicated to making the results worse.

I think we need to stop using search so much. Curated indexes of information are often better for finding what you need. They organize bodies of knowledge that enable us to do more than just play detective and scavenger hunt.

Take a library for example. To find out how to repair a stuck brake caliper, you don't go to the library and tell the librarian "stuck caliper fix". You say "Can I have a book on auto repair, or on repairing car brakes?" You get the book, and it's an index of organized knowledge. In that book you'll learn how to fix the stuck caliper, but also see what causes stuck calipers and how to prevent them - because it's not blog spam designed to fix one error, it's organized knowledge.

Wikipedia is a great curated index. It is literally a giant list of links, with paragraphs summarizing what you can find in different pieces of the links. (it's also an entire semantic database, but ignore that) If you suggested starting Wikipedia to people today, they'd probably say it was crazy and nobody would use it because of how difficult it would be and that the results wouldn't be useful or accurate. And in spite of all that being true, people today probably can barely imagine life without Wikipedia.

I hadn't realized it but I already do this for some things. I build things with Ruby on Rails infrequently enough that I need to reference docs a lot. I've been trained to not bother searching "the web", and instead go straight to the official guides[1]. I'm also Firefox user, so I've set up a dozen or so "keyword" searches[2]. "wiki " brings me to Wikipedia results for , similar for yf- yahoo finance, az- amazon, etc.. For me, this has been the killer feature for Firefox that would prevent me from using Chrome even if there weren't privacy/consolidation of power issues.

[1]: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/ [2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

By all means continue to use your browser of choice, but Chrome does offer the same functionality for as many search engines as you'd like [1]. By default, the keyword for search engines you've used before is just the domain name of the website where the search engine is (which the omnibar is pretty good at filling in for you) but you can customize it to be whatever you want.

[1]: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426?hl=en&co=GENI...

good to know!

I'm pretty sure that DDG also offers this type of filtering through their "bang" shortcuts. [0]

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang

> This is the thing people don't get about search. Not only is it incredibly difficult to accurately predict what content will give people exactly what they want, but there is an entire class of bad actors dedicated to making the results worse.

Most of my problems with Google isn't about spam sites.

Most of my problems with Google are because half the pages they show me doesn't include my search terms.

This isn't a hard problem and I'm tired of hearing people defend it.

Yes, years ago people would keyword stuff pages with white text on white background. I haven't seen this in years.

Build usage profiles on each client you encounter, calculate reputation scores, and weight the reports accordingly?

"Build usage profiles" is pretty much on the opposite pole to DuckDuckGo's whole 'privacy, simplified' deal.

Become Google then?

Google isn't Google anymore so maybe they should.

Verified volunteers.

In the case of plagiarism, require proof, make the reporter do the work. Ask them for the url for the alleged original source.

how about a blacklist browser extension, and like pi-hole, simply share lists of bad domains to omit from search returns.

If that is being done on the client side, then server sends results but extension blocks all of them resulting in an empty results page for viewer.

This needs to be done server side so that blank result pages are avoided. It would improve service for all as it'd be a better product all around.

Enable personal blacklists.

If a site is found in more than x blacklists, manually take a look at it and decide either to remove it or keep it.

I'm pretty sure I could easily bot this though - I'm not an expect web scraper/automator by any means, my experience with PhantomJS is probably quite out of date, but what's stopping me from running x,000's of little scripts on a x,000 different VPS's (or a botnet, if I'm a bit evil), setup a unique looking User Agent and client environment in case of any finger-printing, and adding my competitor to a blacklist x,000 times? I'm pretty sure I could make it all look human enough. The manual check doesn't stop me from flooding the moderation queue at the very least, and perhaps the mod gets genuinely fooled, or convinced that my competitor must be up to no good.

> but what's stopping me from running x,000's of little scripts on a x,000 different VPS's (or a botnet, if I'm a bit evil)

Price. You have to be seriously dedicated or have serious economic muscles to pull this off.

Unfortunately, you only have to compete with real users using that specific feature, and there aren't that many when measured against the power of even cheap attacks.

Then again:

1. even enabling personal blacklists would be a huge benefit to power users even if they aren't aggregated.

2. the user I replied to above suggested running n 1000 vps-es or using a criminal botnet. Both of these are significant hurdles.

Also while running n 1000 vps-es isn't a significant hurdle in todays clouds if it is a one time job, it at least becomes expensive if the blacklists are generated based on active users at random times around the clock forcing would-be abusers to not only fire up their vps-es, running a couple of queries and shut them down but also to keep them running around the clock, or rather in 8 hour shifts to not trigger abuse detection.

What if that option only exists for paid DDG members, though?

Sure, you could game the system. But the drag on your finances would be that you would have to manage thousands of paid DDG accounts.

Oh that it was my expectation. A human would probably need to validate this. They might not be able to validate ALL submissions, but prioritize the ones most people report and it will still improve the results A LOT.

Per account reputation. A bot will either perfect the reports in which case they are working in your favor,or be completely random, in which case you shadow ban/ignore.

Now you’re tracking users, undermining one of their USPs.

You just convinced me to try DDG… for the tenth time. Hopefully this time it sticks!

> I'm not going to switch though because for the most part it's "good enough" and I want to see that hockey stick trend continue.

I’m in the same boat. I am also not going to switch because Google is getting consistently worse and filled with rubbish SEO click farms. That’s why I am surprised by

> This has gotten somewhat better recently, but it's still not nearly as good as Google.

Google is really quite bad.

>!g

If there's an option to get good search results, why isn't it the default?

I believe its the flag to use google's search engine.

Because it's not a single variable equation. There are more variables besides search quality. And I think you agree. If G clubbed a baby seal every time you used it, but produced better results, would you still use G?

Oh, !g in DDG just sends you to the Google search results for that query.

They have more of those too, they’re pretty neat. For example: Typing “United States Capitol !w” will bring you directly to the Wikipedia results page for that search.

And !wde will take you to German wikipedia, !wes to the Spanish, etc.

Also works for amazon: !a for amazon.com, !ade for German amazon.de, etc.

Use !sp instead of !g and you get startpage results which is Google results without the tracking.

!s is enough.

Or at least a "always omit results from this domain" option.

Agree with this! It's fantastic for most things but unkind with programmer API docs!

every time I see !g I say to use !s (startpage) as it's just a proxy :)

I wonder if there's a way to have "verified websites", where for example the actual django documentation site is considered authoritative for searches with django in them.

DuckDuckGo has been my primary search tool for close to a decade now. I also like that ddg.gg redirects to duckduckgo.com. The domain ddg.gg is much easier to type on web browsers where I do not have DuckDuckGo configured as a search engine.

I stumbled upon DuckDuckGo fortuitously after installing Vimperator in Firefox around 2009 or so. If I remember correctly, Vimperator had DuckDuckGo as one of the search engine options and that's how I came to know about it.

I use Vimium with Firefox these days and it is really easy to choose either DuckDuckGo or Google for searching using the keyboard sequences od<space> or og<space>, respectively, if these are enabled as custom search engines in the Vimium options page.

I believe it's their name (and domain) that is holding them back. Sure, Google is a silly word but it's now ubiquitous. But "Duck Duck Go" simply doesn't roll off the tongue. It will make adoption much harder.

The shame of it all is that they do own duck.com. Why not rebrand at this point?

So instead of answering questions by saying "why don't you just google it" people could suggest that you someone "duck it".

Hmmm, maybe that has problems of it's own...

Seriously the name is awful. I really think it hurts adoption.

You clearly don't remember the https://www.dogpile.com/

We remember it, we forgot it, terrible name

Dogpile was at least memorable. I had to remind myself how to spell Cuil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuil

Edit: also, dogpile is somehow still around.... which is worth something I suppose.

Branding seems to be a major problem when it comes to non-commercial (or at the very least "alternative", since DDG is technically still for-profit) services. DDG isn't even that bad in comparison to some others like Mastodon or various Linux desktop apps.

GoDaddy has a similar weird origin.

And I remember when I first heard about Google in the 80's! One of my uncles learned about 1 google from a math book. 10+ years later I heard it again meaning "don't be evil", and now it means "eat my spam". Amazing how people get used to words and silly brand names, just don't make me start with micro-soft ;)

duck.com works as well.

Fun fact: DuckDuckGo has this domain because Google gave it to them after acquiring it for unrelated reasons. It had been the domain of video codec developer Duck Corporation, which changed its name to On2 and was later acquired by Google primarily to get its patent portfolio for the WebM effort.

Google wouldn't assign any IP over without some terms and conditions, which may be what's limiting them from adopting it.

They should drop the "DuckGo". Just "Duck". It's cleaner.

I applied for software engineer job at DDG a couple of years ago. They gave me this page, with the data stopping at 2018, and asked me to create an updated version of the chart showing the projected growth of DDG based on "data" of how I would expect a browser extension to impact their growth. I basically created a PDF of what this page looks like now, but with "projected" data instead of actual, because I didn't have any access to actual data.

Strangest takehome project I ever had for a software engineering position. It was paid though, which is nice.

In 2021, DDG handled 35 billion searches. Google first reached that level in 2002 (if this source[1] is accurate).

I have no conclusion, just thought it was an interesting stat to look up.

[1]: https://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/

Sounds about right. If your search engine traffic is measured on the numerator in the millions, but the denominator is not "per second", then your share of the search market is basically zero.

Might be correct but it was rising exponentially until Google started using dirty tactics again and it is still rising extremely quick while Google isn't rising.

DuckDuckGo has been profitable for years already so they only need patience.

> Might be correct but it was rising exponentially until Google started using dirty tactics again

What "dirty tactics" are you referring to that negatively impacted DDG's growth?

See my reply to dredmorbius (in another subthread): https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=29861689

(I think there is some automation to prevent duplicate content so I link to it instead.)

Hard to compare. The internet and its audience is so much different today.

Been using DuckDuckGo for about 2 years. Amazed at their progress.

Still local searches in Swedish are subpar sometimes.

But I like the fact that they don't seem to be mangling results and manipulating them based on politics.

Google search is pretty useless as it stands now. If I want to find controversial material - for whatever reason, let's say even debunking it - there's a chance google hides it. The recent scandal with Robert Malone and the search term "mass formation psychosis" is really bizarre.

Thank you DDG.

> If I want to find controversial material - for whatever reason, let's say even debunking it - there's a chance google hides it.

I find myself searching for information sometimes and then realize "oh, Google might see this as political in some way." That's my primary reason to use DuckDuckGo.

It is more that any search engine that uses your history to skew future results can send you down a rabbit hole for anything related to some conspiracy theory. It wants to send you results that you like, which means it will promote confirmation bias. People using Google to "do your own research" will find all the things that agree with their preconceptions.

This isn't because the algorithm has a political slant, it is a consequence of how it works. Sometimes this thing helps the user: if my search includes the word "unionized", did my previous searches indicate an interest in chemistry or labor activism?

I just heard his Rogan podcast, ran the same query, got nothing. I knew something was up... time to start using an alternative.

I’ve been using DDG for a few years and rarely find myself using Google anymore. I don’t feel like DDG has gotten much better, but Google results definitely seem like they’ve gotten worse. But I could be wrong.

Either way, I’ve come to loathe Google. Now if only a viable YouTube alternative would emerge…

No, results are definitely tanking.

That’s my sense also. Google results for me are becoming increasingly irrelevant, especially since they stopped honouring double quotes. DDG usually works for me.

Haven't you noticed all the complaints in this discussion that DDG stopped honoring double quotes?

It's averaged over 365 days.

Selecting 10/1 day show a different story:

DuckDuckGo progress as stagnated in 2021.

That's how you lie with statistics.

Interesting: https://i.imgur.com/Ahy0GtP.png

Any speculation on the causes of the plateau?

Could be a plateau, or it could be a temporary peak somewhere around January last year.

My theory is that the growth in 2020 was boosted by the lockdowns and it is now back to where it would have been without COVID.

Google has stepped up their fight against it.

Not by improving their own quality but by throwing more roadblocks in front of Chrome users who want to use DDG.

I try to avoid Chrome.. what roadblocks?

See my reply to dredmorbius (sibling comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=29861689

(I think there is some automation to prevent duplicate content so I link to it instead.)

Specific examples?

(NB: long-time DDG user myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5879227)

It was discussed on HN 4 days ago although it seems to have been flagged off the front page or something after a very short time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29813079

That happens to be my own submission, FWIW.

DDG is accusing Google of manipulating browser-extension standards for Google's own benefit, FWIW.

(Discussing specific examples in contenxt is often useful.)

That particular issue seems to have more bearing on DDG's attempts at creating its own browser than of Google specifically thwarting DDG's search.

> That happens to be my own submission, FWIW.

Ok, I felt something was odd but didn't connect the dots as I was to quick :-D

Anyways, thanks!

NB: for virtually all real-world human-behaviour data, smoothing intervals in multiples of 7 days are the best choice as they smooth out weekly usage patterns.

Try 7, 14, 21, and 28 day smoothing as alternatives to 10.

Note that 7-day averaging results in far less variance than 10-day, despite being a smaller interval.

FWIW, here's a graph[0] of the log of the data[1]. I find it's hard to eye-ball exponentials correctly without taking the log.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/E7OBAX6

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic_data/direct.csv

28 or 90 day average shows essentially the same thing but with less noise. Showing a 365 day average is actually good for the casual observer to remove holiday/seasonal fluctuations and show YoY growth.

They have lost me for the moment.

I was looking for a comment like this. To me this is the real news.

This is the first time I’ve seen DuckDuckGo Traffic not look like a steady exponential. With the 365-day rolling average you can see growth leveling off noticeably by the end of 2021. Without the rolling average you can see an unusual spike in Jan 2021 followed by a V for the remainder of the year.

Oh my, has it been a year again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25779323

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21311064

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22114540

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100243

DuckDuckGo should have its own browser. This way the no track is more sound.

They will have one soon, and they have a mobile browser already, which is my default.

Their mobile browser is actually very nice, I’ve used it almost exclusively for 2 years now.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/21/22848133/duckduckgo-brow...

Haha, I thought that seemed like a good idea, then remembered I'm using it and have been for at least a year... It's a pretty seemless mobile browser CAVEATS: Downloaded files are renamed generically... to "asset.pdf" or similar Bookmark handling is terrible and this could kill it for many users

My main grumble with the mobile browser is that it lacks view-source and about: tools.

Does chrome mobile or safari have a view-source button? if you do view-source:url does that not work on Duck browser?

I'm not sure about a button for view source in any of them.

view-source: appears to still work in chrome mobile (Firefox works too), not sure about safari.

Nope, view-source: does not work on ddg. which seems odd since it looks like it's built on top of chrome. URL's seem like they're parsed oddly.

I have yet to find a way to view source on ddg :(

Firefox Android lacks both as well.

Adding view-source: to the url works for me on FF android.

Huh, confirmed for myself.

Fennec 95.2.0 (F-Droid build of Firefox/Android)

Checking Mozilla Support, this seems to have been a recently-restored capability as it is discussed as recently a 2021/1/10

It seems to have been restored by 2021/1/11

See issues #3710 #3972

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1309515

From https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/3710 it appears the (manually-entered "view-source" option) was restored by build 92.1.1, in a comment dated Sep 14, 2021.

From https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/3972

Feature seems to have been restored to Nightly releases as of 27 May 2021, build 88.1.4

Cheap marketing.

Something happened the past few years where DDG image search feels like a functionally better product than google image search. I think it's a combination of a simpler frontend, and maybe a simpler "keyword-based" search algorithm (vs google which feels more ML-leaning). Note: I can't prove this claim at all – just a general feeling I have as someone who uses image search a lot.

I always reach for it too for some reason

Also you can mostly still click straight though to the image file itself, a feature which I believe Google removed at the request of site owners.

I think it was a lawsuit settlement from Getty Images.

I've noticed whenever I use Google image search it seems like 90% of the results are Pinterest which I have 0 desire to visit whereas I hardly ever see Pinterest on ddg.

Although DDG doesn't really compete in this niche yet, Google's reverse image search has gotten especially awful recently. Yandex does surprisingly well at it.

Google hasd to change image search due to a lawsuit by Getty Images preventing direct linking to the image itself.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...

And the top row(s) in Google images are all for-sale product images masquerading as result.

The graph is averaged over 365 days by default. If you change it to 14 or 28 days you can see that their growth has stagnated since early 2021.

Due to the HN interest in search engines, you may find useful the "Search Engines" entry on Curlie: https://curlie.org/en/Computers/Internet/Searching/Search_En...

And the "Specialized Search Engines" one: https://curlie.org/en/Computers/Internet/Searching/Search_En...

I've been hearing a tremendous number of ads on the radio for DuckDuckGo recently.

It seems they have started a heavy advertising push.

I saw ads for DuckDuckGo at the airport the other day too

I've seen billboards on random interstates across America. I wonder what the ROI on those are.

Also in France.

Add Germany.

Given the low yield of many Interstate billboard adverts ("Your message here" being amongst the more popular), I'd suspect minimal cost and some return.

DDG is making progress but it's still far away from being good especially for local, non-English results. I'm worried whether advertising at this stage is a good idea as it could make people try it, be disappointed and leave a bad impression.

I’ve seen billboards in Boston. Good for them.

How does it compare to Brave Search which is supposedly using their own index and not reliant on Bing? [1]

[1]: https://search.brave.com/

Nit: It can be misleading to show cumulative metrics. You have to mentally take the first derivative. And cumulative metrics never go down! (Guilty of this myself.)

I'd prefer if the chart at the top were daily/monthly queries. Then you'd quickly see their huge growth, but relative stagnation in 2021.

I was mislead by the chart too, i had assumed it was a chart of daily queries (getting a daily average to smoothen it out makes sense to an extent, but a 365 day average when you have this many data points?), however one redeeming quality is they let you change the day average from 365 to say 5 days. Despite that, they still grew by 25% in 2021 (which is much less than their growth in 2020 of ~60%, but still not at the level of stagnation)

That isn't cumulative metrics; it's just heavily heavily smoothed.

Oh, my mistake, thanks!

I made the same mistake; they're both roughly exponential, and the maximum value is different by pretty much exactly one factor of ten.

I'd love to use DDG daily for all my searches but as soon as I'm trying to search for local places (food, clothing, tool shops, whatever that is really) or specific things I want to buy, I get bad results (I'm in the UK) and I have to switch to Google to get what I need. My wife was complaining as well that she wasnt able to find a lot of good hits when doing research for University. I dont know what it's like in other countries but I hope this will improve over the next few years so I can fully switch.

I use Apple Maps for local places. Works well enough in London.

I use Apple Maps too, daily in fact, but only if I know a specific place I'm looking for and I want to get there. What I meant in previous comment was say "milwaukee tools Inverness" to see what shops are stocking them locally so I could possibly go pick them up rather than ordering online. These sort of searches are still behind Google sadly. If I search for "Screwfix Edinburgh" that's totally fine.

Somewhat related: Does anyone know how to report bad links/results in DDG? I had a search the other day for a MacOS issue and the top 3 results was a fake apple software site, super scammy. However I didn't see any buttons or links next to that result to report it specifically.

Here's the help page: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sp...

On Firefox on desktop I see the "feedback" menu in the lower right corner.

On mobile, there is a “Share Feedback” in the hamburger menu; on desktop, there is an almost invisible “Share Feedback” button in the bottom-right corner which disappears if your screen isn’t wide enough. (It seems to me like they don’t quite understand how responsive design is supposed to work, they have some breakpoints but the layout breaks when the window gets narrow, and they load a separate layout for mobile apparently based on UA.)

Personally I haven’t had much success at all submitting feedback. I guess that it is hard when you have so much traffic, but whatever they are doing really doesn’t seem to be working right now.

`!fedex` has been broken for months because FedEx changed their tracking URL. I submitted feedback using the specific form they created for situations like this, and it is still broken.

When you get bad results and know which result should’ve been at the top, there is no way to say what page you expected to see but didn’t, unless you choose “Other” and write it in the box, but I suspect that all goes into a black hole too. Not quite sure what the solution is here since obviously they want their results to not be bad but it’s not so simple as hand-tweaking one query until it’s better.

If one ever wanted a taste of how niche the HN crowd is, just look at the comments here. Most of the top comments are people claiming they primarily use DDG, and rarely Google, which is hinting at DDG rapidly catching up in terms of market share and search quality, whereas in reality no one points out that the overall search traffic handled by DDG is basically what Google handled 18-20 years ago :)

Just to put things into perspective, DDG handles 97M queries a day whereas Google receives ~4M queries a minute.

So to make that comparable, ddg does 100M, Google 6000M per day. Almost 2% is quite impressive, especially considering the quality of ddg search results. Then again, Google search results aren't much better...

Yes, but many products that eventually became blockbusters started by focusing on a niche, and for many, that niche was YC or a techie crowd.

Once in a while I try to switch to Duckduckgo. I first use it, then I start to rely more and more on !g, as I know the results will be irrelevant, until I just have the automatism of adding !g for every search. At that point, when I become aware of it, I just switch back to Google, unfortunately.

In the end, Bing is really, really bad and Duckduckgo is just repackaged Bing.

Google's extremely annoying Cookie selection is a UX nightmare: scrolling past two pages before you can press a button. I'd rather go to the library than use Google Search ever again. (An occasional !g bang in DDG is allowed though.)

A remarkable job by the Great Satan in Redmond of laundering its substandard search engine through the not-really-arms-length privacy-washing marketing subsidiary, duckduckgo. The searches are provided by Bing and the frontend is hosted in Azure, Microsoft controls both sides of the transaction but people buy the privacy fairy tale, hook line and sinker. Really, a remarkable case study.

Here's a fine example of why DDG's search results are worse than useless, if you needed another one.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=FEMA+concentration+camps&ia=web

> Here's a fine example of why DDG's search results are worse than useless, if you needed another one.

Well, we are comparing against Google, aren't we?

The company that let scamware and scareware advertise or SEO their way to the top for years?

How about we cut DDG a similar amount of slack?

Also, have you reported the problematic results? (I complain about Google but I have reported a number of problems over the years.)

> The searches are provided by Bing and the frontend is hosted in Azure, Microsoft controls both sides of the transaction but people buy the privacy fairy tale,

It is still possible to improve privacy quite a bit over Bing.

Also, remember we are comparing to Google here. For most people biggest alternative to using Bing or a frontend Bing is to use Google or a frontend to Google.

Would it be better if they used that?

I have been using duck go for what seems like 4 years now. I also just use the !g if the results are bad, but over the holidays I noticed more scar operations on there product searches. I’m not quite sure why, but when looking for gifts or just things I was interested in I was driven to knockoff sites or total scam pages with multiple urls leading to the same scam. I’ve since reported these, but I will say google still seems to be best at product search imo. This still will not drive me away from DDG, but wish they would do better screening. It is hard to recommend things like that to my less savvy friends and family.

Has anyone else seen this?

Anyone else surprised they don't change their name to Duck.com? (which they own and just use as a forwarder.)

"Duck it" might be worse than "duckduckgo it"

No matter how popular i think few will use the latter - it just does not slip off the tongue at all. The former? it's at lease succinct

I use startpage for search now, which serves anonymized Google results. The search results are far better than customized Google results. It also somehow filters some of these search aggregators.

I second that. I've been using Startpage almost exclusively for about 5 years now and love it. The only time I use DDG is for image search because that's the only thing where I find Startpage lacking. Since I left G+ around 2015 the _only_ Google domain I ever visit is YouTube (in a container).

Big momentum and opportunity for DDG now since we've seen many discussions around the decreasing quality of Google in the past week.

Back in 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page published a research paper that perfectly summarizes the conflict of interest between advertisers and search engines: https://twitter.com/krebs_adrian/status/1479457355620302848?...

I was trying to get away from Google EVERYTHING,found DDG really stoked about it specially when it was my turn on the waiting list for the filtering of the emails. Then all of a sudden my emails weren't coming thru, an I noticed when I'd go to search a website the last site was still open or still sitting there ready for access. At first u thought it was me, but then i started seeing my history an open past sites.But what ended my DDG relationship was when I was asked if I wanted to stay with Chrome or open new tab with DDG? When I have Chrome an Google disabled. Looked into DDG like i have Google an they are NOT as PRIVATE as they say.So if privacy is what your after please do your homework and take a little deeper look at DDG.Maybe Tor,Bravo,Dark Onion. And just so you know out there it is possible to live your life "Google Free" they say you cant but you believe it you can.Good luck with what you choose to do.

Just changing my search habits helped a lot in in finding results quickly and managing the SEO spam for both DDG and Google.

I'm using Julia for a project right now, and answers are almost always found in either the Julia Discourse forum or Stack Overflow. By just searching either of those directly (plus more carefully reading the official documentation) I have found what I'm looking for much more easily.

The situation is more difficult with Python because the community aspect is more dispersed. But because my questions almost always have to do with using the standard library of external libraries, I've found devdocs.io to the be much simpler and more direct, especially because it runs offline. It covers >90% of cases for me with the docs for numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas, and base Python.

Maybe SEO spam forcing us back to RTFM will actually be a force for good?

Isn't DuckDuckGo just a wrapper around Bing search results? I see lots of complaints about DDG search results but those complaints should be directed to Bing, not DDG.

(I understand that DDG does some value-add to the results returned by the Bing API).

I still don't get what I want out of DDG, but every time google hits me with their fucking "train my ML with this select the americanism please" for no good reason BS I go straight to DDG.

I use DDG regularly and it's pretty well-known on HN, but does anyone know much about these 'private' engines? I can't seem to learn much about them (beyond what they promise on their websites)

* Qwant: https://qwant.com

* Startpage: https://startpage.com

* Ecosia (is it intended to be private in the same way as the others?): https://www.ecosia.org

Startpage is just a privacy frontend for Google.

The quality was just as miserable as Google last I checked; seriously underestimating me and overestimating their miserable Artificial Intelligence.

I don't know if it works privacy wise but I assume so.

(Think I'm hyperbolic here? No, I'm not and I've saved screenshots of some of the spectacularly dumb things their AI does: https://erik.itland.no/more-fun-with-google-mixing-images-fr...)

Edit:

Try also kagi.com (if you can get access), Neeva, you.com, wiby (two different ones) and just for fun also https://search.marginalia.nu

The last one runs on a desktop machine in some living room in Sweden and held off a massively upvoted story here on HN. Not production quality but still a joy to use and have sometimes brought me better results than both Google and DDG.

I’ve been having better results with searx than ddg for the past month or two. Especially because ddg seemed to have forgotten what to do with quoted text.

DDG is Bing. You all know that right? This is just another alternative Microsoft product like Ecosia and Yahoo.

And so?

Startpage is just Google.

If you dislike being tracked by Google and Bing it is still better to use DDG or Startpage.

We should have more than two search engines.

Yep, and now we are in a better position than we have been in a long time since a number of engines are building their own indexes.

In my opinion the most interesting in this regard (i.e. building its own index) is marginalia who shows that a meaningful addition to the search engine space can be run by a single person on single consumer PC running in a living room.

Anecdotally I’ve noticed the DDG search result relevance/quality improve a lot in that time too.

Well done DDG - I rarely use Google search these days. I’ve found the search operators work more reliably too which is great for locating specific results you know you once saw somewhere and should’ve bookmarked.

Interesting graph.

In my company's anecdotal experience DDG referrals have been historically flat. They went up a little bit around 1 year ago, then settled back down to their consistent (and relatively small) production. They rank 12th in our list of referrals, or 0.24% of total.

Bing is 2%.

Google is 47%.

(Good ol' Yahoo is 2x DDG)

Are DDG searches fulfilled by Bing?

Mostly yes, but also Yandex, Wikipedia, etc. But for reference the https://mojeek.com is actually an independent search engine, with own index and crawler.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

Sounds like Bing is the main source, but with significant amounts of other things sprinkled in.

Been using DDG for years and as time goes on I use !g less and less. I use it so rarely now that I'll probably forget it exists as an option. Love using !w, very convenient.

Exponential growth is so fascinating, and also the fact that so many things follow this pattern.

The DDG traffic almost perfectly matches an exponential growth curve.

A curious aspect of how it is misunderstood is how it looks to those who don't consider how exponential growth presents - basically nothing for a long time as exponential growth stats slow, then suddenly after it crosses a threshold, "wow its growing so fast", despite the growth rate being the same between the two.

We see things as binary much of the time. Exponential growth presents as "not there"/"not viable" for a long time, until it hits a threshold and is suddenly viable/there.

I like the premise, but the search results keep disappointing me every other month or so I try it for a couple of days again. Sometimes it's even worse than Bing.

I can use DDG only for finding out the TLD for sites I forgot the actual address. To search the internet, I consider it rather useless.

I've started hearing DDG ads on my local bloomberg radio station, it's going fully mainstream

No reason not to use DDG as your default search engine and if you can’t find it (or learned not to expect it) then there is always !g to search Google, which I do about 50% of the time.

But anything moving me away from the internet octopus the better, even if it’s only 50%.

Use DDG daily.

One thing thats really strange is duckduckgo is getting a boost of traffic from antivax people. Go on twitter and most every post is antivaxers/conspiracy people encouraging users to try DDG vs google because DDG doesn't suppress some random posts.

https://twitter.com/search?q=%22duckduckgo%22%20&src=typed_q...

Is growth when they only have a minor amount of censorship if any.

I've been using DuckDuckGo to look up taboo topics such as vaccine data and conspiracy theories. I want Google to think I'm a 100% compliant COVID vaxxer and 'science' believer.

To be honest brave.search does a better job in my opinion. Just wondering how they do that as a newcomer.

Looks like they acquired it: https://brave.com/brave-search/

Thanks very intersting. Actually makes sense what they did. So far it is really a nice alternative, to bing and google.

Brave search has been my default since it debuted. It's fine for me 90% of the time. Google still completely rules image search, but for normal queries Brave does the job.

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