Duck Duck Go Passed 1mm Searches Per Day
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For many searches, google's results I find are better - a common issue I've found it DDG's results are just too general for quite specific searches - .e.g the top result is teh homepage of a brand when I search for something more specific like "brand something something" (sorry i can't come up with a great example right now).
I still use DDG as I can use the rest of the bang syntax to get to wikipedia et al, and for certain things the results (e.g. code/technical) are clearly superior to googles.
I hope DDG logs all the times I go to DDG, then add in !g, to get some great analytics on when I found the search results lacking!
In facilitating your use of google for your specific searches, which you apparently can determine the likelihood of beforehand, ddg gets more of your searches for everything else. This is definitely a win for you and ddg, perhaps even for google if it increases your dependence on queries in general.
Also, I don't think ddg is trying to replace google. From your numbers, ddg is getting ~ 30% of your queries without having to implement deep search.
ddg doesn't log ip addresses/track you, so they could only probabilistically identify cases where people think ddg would do better but then fall back to google, but it will likely get harder and more computationally intense as they grow.
Re. tracking, it's not just searches that I do that go directly to google; it's the times I go to DDG, am unsatisfied with the results, then tack on "!g" to try it on google. This should provide valuable data on when a user deems results not good enough.
For many years I pretty much laughed at Google-search wannabes. Now I really want there to be a credible alternative.
I've set DDG as my preferred search. But I'm still !banging to Google at least half the time.
Can haz moar betters releventz plz!
But higher level, !g roughly accounted for 1% of queries yesterday, which also includes all the cases where we ran out of results and people clicked on our Try google link.
My point isn't specifically you rank SO lower than it should imo (although i do think this is the case) - its in general, for me, you return roots of homepages or brands at hte top when the query is clearly looking for something very specific.
Btw, we index SO ourselves, e.g. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nginx+apache
We just have a high bar to show it, but are working on that piece so it comes up more. It's also full punctuation.
Might also be the sort of thing to look at with a specific focus group. I know that the trend is to use a naive audience, but you might want to specifically recruit self-selected power-users.
I'd also design such a study to blind the result sets. I know Microsoft raised a bit of a stir claiming that their search results in blind testing were better than Google's a fair bit of the time. Problem at least personally with those results are that the two things I care about in search are relevance, and credibility in protecting user interests.
Microsoft have a very poor track record in that latter. I don't Bing. Period.
Is the promise of no tracking/bubbling a big draw for you?
I'm also a believer in competition. If we can create a competitive market for privacy and respecting personal data, so much the better.
Personally, though, I can't live without deep search. I'd say about 99.9999% of my searches are in the "brand something something" category, and there's not much point in adding an extra step to every search.
Unfortunately for DDG, my less tech-savy friends have had a similar experience. Since they're never going to try (or comprehend) the !bangs, after two or three attempts at a deep search they inevitably say "Well this is nice, but Google gives me what I'm looking for exactly."
Me, I was on Scroogle until recently when it's availability started to really suffer. Now, it's all Goosh, all the time!
I think it's fine to use whatever it takes to get the message across.
And a letter can stand for multiple things, from temperatures to chemical elements to whatever.
As long as we're being pedantic, that is.
The other side you see it is in CPM which is cost per m (being thousand).
So people with this background tend to adopt the MM = million because that's how its done.
A few arguments as to why this is such a lousy notation:
* m and M already exist in the International System of Units, which is used by pretty much everybody else (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Non-Metric_User.svg). 'm' is either milli (10^-3) or meters, depending on the context. And M is Mega, or the number in question: one million.
* If the reason is to use roman numerals. M, for mille, means 1000. However, MM would mean two thousand, the same way XXII is 22.
* "Million" isn't ambiguous, unlike "billion", which either means 10^9 or 10^12.
I would have listed other, more toxic and/or embarrassingly unsuccessful examples, like:
- Privacy practices - Adsense/Adwords - Search personalization "features" - Docs - Buzz - Jaiku - Wave - etc...
Without Adsense, there is no Google. Everything else is just a platform for it.
One has to wonder if Google had just stuck with search, the search product would be significantly better than it is today. Instead we've got Google trying to be everything to everyone, at the cost of the integrity of those search results.
I'd like to see better integration with maps; geographic constraint and context seem to be in the natural progression of search engine growth.
Yikes
For one, I miss the days when Google search felt fresh, magical, and honest. Search Plus Your World just irks me, because, as many have pointed out, it isn't providing relevant results and its shoving G+ down my throat.
As an aside, I'm interested to see which major search engine will partner with Tumblr. I'm not smart enough to figure out the details of the relationship, but I think have access to their stream of data could be pretty cool.
M = 1'000 in Roman. So MM is a million.
1 mm = 0.001 m = 0.001 metres
but
1 MM = 1000000 M = 1000000 ?????
Just like 1 KB is 1024 bytes, not 1000. ;)
Why can't DDG just cut their losses and invest in building their own index? It's much more worth it in the long run. All DDG is doing is adding cool, nice to have UI features on top of Bing/Yahoo, but what about the core?
> Why can't DDG just cut their losses and invest in building their own index?
That's far from trivial task.. Scraping and using other peoples results is easy, building and scaling a huge database like search index is one of the hardest problems you can find.
More results doesn't always give better results. Generally, they do, but depending on the problem it's often very marginal.
The actual ranking algorithm is more important, especially (I suspect) pre-processing. Google's main advantage (I'd guess) is its expertise in algorithms and processing.
1. Performance. There's a small but significant gap between the two services in terms of the speed in which they serve redirects and search results.
2. Features. Although a lack of features like mail, maps etc. is, I suppose, part of ddg's philosophy, I feel like it's merely inconvenient compared to google where all it's services are immediately available with a click. Also, ddg doesn't save any web history which can actually be very useful for people using more than one computer.
It's not that I dislike ddg and what it does. It fills a nice gap in the market and I like it's principles of privacy. But for now, performance trumps freedom I guess :p
As for having mail, maps, etc. I prefer they don't. That'd basically mean tracking. Just set up your browser to have it accessible if it's a big deal for you. Can be done in several ways.
... I just hope they stay true to their goals it seems silly to compete on crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam, real privacy and a better overall search experience. http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...
Amazing job!
DDG's privacy policy is superb. Its search result is pretty good with non of the bloats. I still remember how Google Preview was infuriatingly distracting that I had to install add-on to get rid of it completely.