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Comment by suking | Hacker News Reader

I'm so sick of these DDG stories. The truth is no one uses them, 99.9999% of people outside SV have never heard of them and currently there is no reason to switch to them.

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My dad came to me just the other day and told me he didn't like the stories about Google recording every page he searched for, so I told him to use DDG. Heck if I know how big the market is, but if my parents care without me telling them, it has a better chance than most of the startups I hear about on Hacker News.

Sheesh. This was true of Google in the late 1990s when I was telling my coworkers to use it. If everyone listened to people like you then we'd be using Yahoo! and Altavista today.

The difference is that Google was actually better.

DDG is better for some people. I use it and haven't missed Google yet. There are some things I need Google for (!m gives me a map for example) and some things I prefer Google for (I use G+), but for general search DDG is a better experience for me.

Really, why did anyone ever switch from Yahoo? It wasn't for the results, Google provided the search results for Yahoo for awhile. Many people, myself included, switched to Google for the clean interface.

Now I've switched to DDG not just for the results (which are 95% "just as good") but for the privacy, the variety (I like the idea of competing services), and some of the interesting things DDG is doing with providing information directly.

As I've said before, search is an intensely personal tool. Don't use a tool if you don't like it, but recognize that other people might like a tool even if you think it's terrible.

The thing I don't understand is, for all that DDG does, there's really nothing that Google and/or Bing couldn't just copy wholesale if it were really that great.

The ONLY thing DuckDuckGo can do that Google won't is "privacy" (maybe "less ads" is another thing). While that might be reason enough for some people to switch, it's barely going to make a dent in Google's dominance.

Sometimes the value can be in what you don't do, e.g. keeping things simple.

Reading all these comments made me wonder... If DDG uses the Bing API and is passing the search term to whatever search-related text ads they show, that's a pretty big blind spot for the privacy advocates. Because Bing still gets your search term and so does the ad network. What they don't get is your IP address, but as the AOL search dump proved, sometimes search terms alone are enough to identify someone. It's still a nice feature, but I wouldn't consider it a solved issue.

Bing gets everyone's search terms merged together, with no way to distinguish individual users. To Bing, it looks like one user doing a bajillion searches on all manner of topics.

In the AOL case, while IP addresses were stripped, users were identified with unique keys so you could see individual users' search sequences. That is not the case here.

I switched. For 80-90% of my queries it gets me to the same place as Google just as quickly, or more quickly in some cases. For the other 10-20% there's the !bang syntax, which also lets me search images and maps right from the Chrome address bar without ever hitting the mouse.

Use the tools that make you most productive. For me, that's DDG. For you, maybe not. But I think "...there is no reason to switch to them" just isn't accurate in general.

For 80-90% of my queries it gets me to the same place as Google just as quickly, or more quickly in some cases

By quickly, do you mean in less time (search speed is more), or in fewer clicks (search quality is more / relevant links are above)?

I was thinking of wall time, but in general the number of clicks is the same. Again, for me. YMMV.

I suspect we all tend to search for the same types of things over and over. Ruby developers search for Ruby docs and modules, stamp collectors search for auctions and information about stamps, etc.

So I fully understand that my experience won't be shared by everyone.

Unfortunately for me, the most used !bang function was "!g" to re-run the search on Google. I used DDG daily for months as my default search engine and on about half of all my queries (most of them technical searches), it would give poor enough results that I'd scan the page, re-run the query with "!g " and find a useful result on Google in the first or second listing.

I finally admitted to myself that I was wasting too much time having to run so many searches twice and I switched back to Google.

I am in the same camp. I would like an option for custom bangs

I haven't had that problem at all. Most of my searches are technical and I rarely have to switch to Google. I would suggest giving it another try every few months if you aren't satisfied with it.

I think that's the main issue for anyone who wants to best google.

I'm not particularly disapointed with google search, and if I try something I don't like, I won't try it again unless a friend tells me it's changed a lot.

That business is clearly one-shot, either v1 is good or you're going to have to fight uphill against a bad rep of your own making.

I don't see DDG taking Google's search crown. But it could happen the way Firefox opened the barn door - then other browsers came to take the crown (Chrome, for example).

[1] indicates DDG uses third-party APIs for deep web searches. To me that sounds like how Inktomi was a "search engine API" and neither Inktomi nor Yahoo saw Google coming [2].

Even if DDG doesn't succeed, Google is now at the top of the hill and therefore is _the_ target for all competitors.

[1] http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...

[2] http://diegobasch.com/a-relevant-tale-how-google-killed-inkt... and HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3924609

Last time I tried both, I liked Blekko a lot more than DDG. So unless the "don't let ads track me" becomes a huge issue - like 100x bigger than it is now - I doubt people will be switching from Google to DDG.

I recently almost completely stopped using youtube. Then I downloaded adblock video plugin - was using firefox at that time.

Ads can be a major pain, and any business that requires them is probably going to fail, intolerance to ads is building up as ads are more and more agressive.

Switching to DDG because of ads wouldn't make much sense, they'll get their own ads when they have to pay for servers, too.

I don't think DDG needs to take anybody's crown to be successful. It provides a service to a few niches, mainly the tinfoil hat types and to people who mostly use Google as an intermediary to find wikipedia articles or posts on stack overflow and want a low-friction alternative. Or there's me: I mainly prefer the keyboard shortcuts.

Anyway, my point is that 1% of the search market is about half a billion dollars in revenue.

It'll be interesting to see if Gabriel keeps up with the affiliate model or moves toward an in-house ad solution.

No.. That's a common misconception. 1% of search market is not 1% of revenue because companies won't spend any time and investment in places with little traffic.

Bing is 20% of search market yet last I checked they are nowhere near that amount in revenue

>currently there is no reason to switch to them

How so?

DDG offers privacy, something that Google and other big search engines do not. That is more than enough reason- especially with growing privacy concerns in the US.

If you just want Google results with privacy, you could try https://startpage.com

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