DuckDuckGo Direct queries per day (28 day average)

We've been reading epi0Bauqu's posts about DDG here for... what is it now? Over 3 years? At first it seemed like a wonderfully quixotic project - a new, home-grown search engine? Yeah right!

But then a year passed, then another, and traffic was up, and then it was up some more, and it seemed like he would never give up... at some point it stopped looking quixotic, and started to be a joy to watch. Will love to see what the future will bring.

I also think that their name is part of the reason for their success. It's different from 'google' or 'bing' or 'yahoo' and it yet it is specific for what it does and I think lends people a partial understanding as to what the benefits are, right out of the box.

I've been getting the DDG newsletters since day 1, but I can't seem to fully adapt to duck duck go. I guess I just am addicted to using google.

=EDIT= For those commenting that they aren't familiar with the name, its interesting that you still understand its a search engine. Thus for you, understanding the context of the name is irrelevant. But for those not familiar with search engines, but do know duck duck goose, I think its pretty logical to explain 'duck duck go' as a search engine.

I didn't realise they had done that to ehow. I wonder if they could kill some of the region specific crap. If you search for a company here in Auckland you get these junk sites (localist, hot frog, finda) that have out of data that's been scraped an age ago and for some reason ranks high. This would probably be a deciding factor in browser choice for me.

Wow, that's good to see perl 'still' being used by someone that big. I didn't believe you to begin with but to quote the wikipedia article: "The search engine is written in Perl and runs on nginx, FreeBSD and Linux."

But it also gives very good results for common search tasks. Compared it myself to few other not so known search engines and it gives even better results than Google since it doesn't seem to favor corporate web pages but rather relevant results. Google became too big and too greedy and top of it all caved into the mass surveillance scheme, behind our backs. Why use a search engine and products endorsed by hypocrites. At least yahoo did some minor fight although they are not exactly better either, but that fight did give many of us a warning about what is going on behind the curtains.

I didn't realise they had deleted ehow, is this actually true? Isn't that a bad thing for neutrality? Where do you draw the line?

First, I am sure your comment about language selection was personal. Facebook in large part stands on PHP; does that mean PHP is better than perl?

Second, I am not sure about their future. It looks like its a temporary spark after all the omg-goverment-tracks-my-searches paranoia.

The fact is, if the large organisations such as Google or Microsoft could not admit on the record to participation in PRISM, what makes you think Duck will? Further, if PRISM is real and if large organisations such as Google or Microsoft could not say "no", what makes you think Duck will have an option for a different fate? Lastly, if there is no trucking by gov of your searches, then there is not much different in using Google versus Duck for someone who has been using Google for years and just temporarily switched to Duck.

Is there a way to make the change on an iPhone? Or is that change pointless since you're on an apple product anyways?

Interesting. My experience is different; I never use Google Search signed in (except once in a blue moon by accident) and clear their cookies every time I restart my browser (daily, at a minimum). Consequently, they don't know that much about me.

I still find their results better than DDG's, unfortunately, and reverted my default search from DDG to Google after I found I was prefixing almost every search with !g.

But unlike you, I rarely search for anything as general as "Egypt". I wouldn't even think to. For general info about a whole country I would go to Wikipedia or Wikivoyage or similar instead. I hit Google when searching for something more specific, like info on a particular protest in Egypt, or monad libraries for JavaScript.

I wouldn't describe Googles as a perfect search at any stretch. The spammy sites that have scraped a terrible version of some old data that is vaguely related to my search terms a a constant irritation, and scrolling past several adverts its very annoying. NSA and creepy tracking aside.

Sounds just like when google was new. As good sign, I'd say.

Bing is only one index source. They have their own crawler, plus they pull from dozens of other sources.

http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-source...

To get out of your search "bubble". This explains it pretty well: http://dontbubble.us/

I kind of like the !bang syntax for searches. Its easier than curating a big list of specific search engines (stackoverflow, wikipedia, amazon, google, ...) yourself.

To each his own, but I think the name is endearing and cute.

I've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine ever since the NSA fallout came, and the results are surprisingly usable for most common tasks. In some cases they feel better than Google because I'm seeing some useful sites that Google doesn't ordinarily show.

The only area where DuckDuckGo searches have been lacking for me is in finding useful technical articles and code results. Sometimes when I have to search for a complicated error message or research some programming problem to see how other people have approached it DDG will not work for me and I have to resort to Google or directly search Stackoverflow or something.

But it's already usable for the average person IMO.

I think it's better than "bing" and "yahoo".

Same here, good for them, I think they are really good people who deserve the success.

Also hate the name, but I guess silliness is hip.

Granted you probably don't have to worry about this on Google but if you'd typed the name as one word (which it always is, AFAIK) you would have gotten the proper results.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+bang+feature

You can consider that a shortcoming given how specific the query was. However, once you realize its behavior it isn't that difficult to find what you want– in some cases, it's actually very helpful.

I'm not sure I agree completely. There are some advantages. One being that if you are interested in advertising, you can work with optimizing 1 campaign instead of 4.

I use !g more than I type standard queries, but I use !g once for every hundred times I type !yt, !w, !gh, &c. The proper search results are sometimes inferior to Google, but the bang queries make it more useful for me regardless.

Same here. I used DDG a couple of years ago, for about 2 months. I also ended up going back to Google for at least 30% of my queries. As a result of the reduction in productivity, I decided to switch back to Google. Besides the anonymity there are a couple of features I like, but content wise there is no match to Google at the moment. One thing I like is the bang feature (!stackoverflow hello world), but realize that Chromium offers something more convenient built-in, which I also rarely use in practice.

Still waiting for something that brings the best of both worlds.

You can always use Startpage to use Google https://startpage.com/. I use both Startpage and DDG frequently. Sometimes the results of one are what I want and sometimes the other.

The whole idea of there being just one useful search engine doesn't make sense to me. I only wish these companies would do more to differentiate themselves and that there were more options.

My take: In 2 months of using DDG I've only had to go back to Google twice, and there were quite a few queries where it was even better than Google (mainly because of the meta information it showed at the top https://duckduckgo.com/?q=4+largest+countries+in+the+Caribbe... surprised me)

I have a few bookmark keywords I use for searching

so ohgodhelpme will search stackoverflow for ohgodhelpme

g will search duckduckgo

go will search google.

I have noticed that as well, I gradually migrated from typing in "g whatever" to "go whatever"

Kind of depressing actually. Because I do like DDG.

From what I can tell, not a heck of alot. It can't do anything about the fact that I will send google my cookies when I go to google.com

It does point to https://encrypted.google.com, which is slightly better, but not much...

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/32367/what-is-th...

Nope, it's just a redirect to Google with your query filled in for the appropriate query string argument.

If you want to use Google privately, use Start Page (http://startpage.com) or Ixquick (http://ixquick.com).

It does not, because !g effectively redirects you to google.com/search?q=foo, where the g00g tracks you as it always does.

You can use !sp (StartPage) to get a proxied Google query result.

Google search, no privacy disclosure.

That's my first fallback if straight DDG doesn't work. I'm falling back less often (about one month of solid DDG use now).

Judging by my own experience and some of my colleagues, this seems to be the case.

I switched to DDG about a week before the whole NSA thing. At first it was awkward, queries are slower than google (sometimes the results are worse), but after a while I stopped noticing it.

I don't mind waiting a second more if it means not being tracked, and most of the time my queries are simple and the results are on par with other search engines.

*edit changed <<worst>> to <<worse>> the results aren't that bad...

I soft-switched a month or two ago and in the beginning was adding !g to pretty much every query out of habit. Over the last week however I decided to poke around more (checking out the other ! tags, understanding what sorts of special queries would get answers) and have only asked for Google results once since to compare with DDG. Google's presentation is still much better (i.e. if I type in Yankees on Google I get a fully styled box score and schedule... with DDG I get some Wikipedia suggestions and a small blurb from MLB/ESPN news underneath.) but for web results I haven't been too disappointed. It's far less frustrating than I remember it being for regular use, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if recent events have prompted more casual users to commit to it.

Edit: For a good example of its biases, search "hacker news" on ddg, bing, then google.

That graph only goes to May. The increase happened two months later. For the date range it shows, their estimates match up with the usage graph on DDG almost perfectly.

I use the Wikipedia auto-suggest url [1], it works great for my needs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search=...

Try http://ddg.gg/.

Why not just create a URL alias? Firefox and Chrome both have pretty good add-ons for creating aliases.

I've moved to using it as my default search provider. I'm using it well over half the time and if the results aren't great I add !g to the end to get google's results.

Try ddg.gg

They have http://ddg.gg/ though.

If the connection between you and DDG is over SSL, what does it matter that they've scraped your encrypted packets?

I like the idea but I don't understand how you could switch to a site that ugly.

This data covers roughly 3 years. Obviously, they started small but they've been around 1.5 million queries per day for a while.

The "28 days" in the title is a little misleading. It's just the smoothing applied to the graph, not the total time period.

Source? Storage is pretty cheap, but storing everything? That's a lot of data. (You'd have to store a copy of that netflix movie every time it's played back)

Right here!

What data?!

It's been on HN front page several times in the last 4 years.

And if that then becomes the new average for DDG, is it still misleading? According to the chart, it has a great chance of maintaining its post-Bloomberg new levels.