Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisLTD | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how much DDG's traffic has grown as a direct result of Google's perceived gaffes in the last few months.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I switched to DDG after Google started pushing Plus in their search results.

It's Google privacy, or lack of, that drove me to DDG. I clicked on a Youtube video link on Reddit the other day and it asked me to verify my age. I didn't have a Youtube account! Then I remember it's after March 1 and Google is using my GMail account for Youtube. I didn't create a Youbute account because I don't want to. No thanks. I don't want my video watching or search being tracked.

No thanks.

This is off-topic, sorry, but if you change the youtube link from /watch?v=CODE to /v/CODE you usually get a working full-window player without an age verification prompt. You lose the often insightful comments of the youtube community, though, so it's not all roses.

Thanks man, I can't upvote this enough. I stumbled on the video posted in [1] and now I can watch it.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3637983

Just a preface, I'm giving this anecdotally, not claiming it to be the cause.

I was at a birthday lunch the other Sunday and it was an extended family kind of event, when my mum, who is considerably computer illiterate, was talking about DuckDuckGo. You can imagine my surprise, DDG to me has always been something of a geek's search engine.

Apparently it had been covered by the morning news, as a viable alternative to google. Not only this, the segment was apparently recommending people opt out of google tracking their usage, brought about by the recent privacy changes.

I don't know if you consider their privacy policy change a recent gaffe, but I would consider that story to be an indirect result of those changes.

I'm curious how much DDG's traffic has grown as a direct result of Google's perceived gaffes in the last few months.

It's not Google gaffes, but unavailability that's been driving my DDG use. Whenever google.com fails to resolve in DNS for me, or Google's server fails to respond, I switch to DDG. Unfortunately, events like this have been happening frequently of late.

I'm on Comcast in Houston. Anyone else experiencing this?

You're not the only one. I counted three occasions just in the last week when an attempted Google visit timed out, yet DDG and Bing worked fine. Not sure what's going on behind the scenes at Google.

I wasn't sure if that was DNS resolution or simply Google "forwarding" that was slow. Either way it has been fairly annoying -- almost to the point that I'm loading cached pages and looking on that page for a direct link.

I don't think ISP is playing a role as I experience similar results at $HOME and $WORK which are on 2 completely different networks/backbones.

Yeah, I've been having lots of issues with google search and gmail lately. I thought it was me since I did not see people complaining on twitter.

If this is happening to more people, why haven't people been talking about it?

I switched because I was unhappy about being bubbled.

http://dontbubble.us/

Ditto: Google Truthiness.

And the new privacy policy drove me away.

And !mysql is so much quicker than site:mysql.com.

It's a legitimate reason to switch. I first became skeptical of Google when they released the awful Blog Search. Here was a search company, with a growing market being neglected and their entry was an absolute dud. This was around the same time that they were releasing a lot of non-search products. I wondered where their priorities were then, and today there is no doubt.

I switched to DDG after Google started giving me 500 server errors in every web search, complete with a request to send a bug report to an email address that turns out to be undeliverable. That was about 3 weeks ago, and I've been generally much happier with DDG (despite the standard caveat of subpar search results).

In the traffic graph there seems to be a distinct correlation between the changed privacy policy and the start of the rapid growth. Did Google not announce it in early or mid January?

Myself I have long thought of switching from Google due to their annoying UI changes and their lack of regard of user privacy, but this change privacy policy was the thing that finally motivated me to switch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com