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DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

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Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#11

Post by rpgmaker »

newscracker wrote: post #3

> “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.” It won't help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great. I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very…

I was planning on moving to the DDG on my phone because Google Search it's unbearable (or Now or whatever the heck that app is now) and their mobile app sucks. It tries to be a web browser when I just wanted a search engine, I'm perfectly content with my mobile browser. It surprised me that MS Bing also suffers from this (yes, I was that desperately to stop using google search on my mobile). It's ridiculous.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#12

Post by funkyy »

In all honesty, despite me knowing about DDG for reaaaaalllly long time, I still tend to forget their name. "something duck" is how non-tech people reference it. Cant you really name it something easy to remember and (ouch) Google like Duckgo? Or Ducker? Or anything else that can be pronounced by anyone within one breath?

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#13

Post by lips »

My experience has been reminiscent of the old SE days, when different engines would often fare better/worse for varying queries, vs there being an all-out winner. I think of DDG as avoiding a fair amount of overtly "consumer" content. Google is great at getting to "interaction points," DDG is great for information. I quite like the DDG ability to play embedded videos from the search results page, and their accompanying privacy warning.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#14

Post by will_pseudonym »

muddi900 wrote: post #6
newscracker wrote: post #3

> “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.” It won't help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great. I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very…

I use DDG because of custom search 'bangs'. I have gotten rid of a whole bookmark sub folder of custom keyword searches. When I want google, which is less and less often, I just add a '!g' to my search. I doubt DDG will ever catchup to the Big G, but It works.

Is that similar to Chrome's "search engines"? They work really well, and I tend to use google's "site:" filter to search sites that have awful search capabilities.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#16

Post by LeoPanthera »

funkyy wrote: post #12

In all honesty, despite me knowing about DDG for reaaaaalllly long time, I still tend to forget their name. "something duck" is how non-tech people reference it. Cant you really name it something easy to remember and (ouch) Google like Duckgo? Or Ducker? Or anything else that can be pronounced by anyone within one breath?

I always give the url as ddg.gg

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#17

Post by ugexe »

funkyy wrote: post #12

In all honesty, despite me knowing about DDG for reaaaaalllly long time, I still tend to forget their name. "something duck" is how non-tech people reference it. Cant you really name it something easy to remember and (ouch) Google like Duckgo? Or Ducker? Or anything else that can be pronounced by anyone within one breath?

I've never had a problem remembering their name after I first heard of them forevvvver ago, and recall thinking Google was a stupid name. Altavista, infoseek, dogpile, askjeeves... clearly the name is not important

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#18

Post by myztic »

DuckDuckGo really looses the battle when it comes to search results.

And since they make the case with privacy, I also want to make clear, they don't loose because Google tracks us all, even if you are logged out from your account, use vpn servers, delete all of your cookies and cache, Google is just so much better and DuckDuckGo awful and some search results are just weird.

I tried once (it must have been this year) to use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine, basically whenever I did not find something quickly enough I just switched to Google and then found my object of desire often times instantly. One of my VPN-Servers is blocked by Google and because of that I am using Bing at the moment, which also seems so much better than DuckDuckGo was when I used it.

I installed LinuxMint on a non-techy person's machine a while ago (few weeks) and DuckDuckGo was set up as default search engine with Firefox, even that person used Google, because he/she wasn't happy with the search results. Used Google even though he/she had to manually go to google.com every single time

"We don't bubble you" is a unique selling point they have profited greatly from, and that's what made them well known to begin with, nothing else really.

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#19

Post by sundarurfriend »

newscracker wrote: post #3

> “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.” It won't help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great. I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very…

FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so. It used to be that 90% of my searches ended up repeated with !g to go to google, but nowadys I'd guess that's like 30%, and even among those, half the time google's answer quality ends up the same.

The only cases where Google is predictably and consistenly superior are 1. error/diagnostic messages: DDG still sucks at precision search, and quotes are not always the answer; 2. queries that require Natural Language Processing: Google understands stuff like "the bad moustache guy from XYZ series" where I myself have only a vague idea of what I'm looking for.

And oftentimes the Instant Answers end up offsetting somewhat poorer quality of results, so kudos to DDG for coming up with those.

(None of this is meant to disqualify your experience though, just expressing my own joy at their results having improved for my use case.)

Re: DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

#20

Post by dalke »

douche wrote: post #10
newscracker wrote: post #3

> “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.” It won't help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great. I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very…

Am I nuts, or has DDG been around for a very long time? Wikipedia says it started in 2008, but for some reason it's lodged in my mind along with Excite, Alta-Vista, AskJeeves and the other pre-Google search engines.

https://duckduckgo.com/about says "DuckDuckGo began as an idea" on February 29, 2008, and on September 25, 2008 "DuckDuckGo was announced to the Hacker News and reddit communities".

FWIW, here's the original HN announcement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142 .

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