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DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

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11–20 of 130 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#11

The key for switching to DuckDuckGo for me was to set it as the default searchengine / startpage on all browsers. While the relevance of search results is slightly (noticable) worse than Google, I think the tradeoff between privacy VS result-quality is worth it. Thanks for making such a great product!

I have it set in only one of my browsers and am always jarred when DDG results come up, quickly falling back to !g

Switching over everywhere would probably help me adapt more quickly.

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#12
For the team here at DuckDuckGo, we were excited not only to hit 14M searches in a single day but to also cross the threshold of 10B total private searches served. Of which 4B were from last year alone.

We wrote a post covering it in our newly launched blog: https://spreadprivacy.com/10-billion-fc7808c91343

It is always an amazing and humbling moment when we hit a new milestone in our metrics. Our team is so incredibly passionate about what we do. To have people from all over the world rally around this concept of raising the standard of trust online and build this product is one thing. But, for users to endorse that mission at such a growing pace and to share us with their friends and family -- it lets us know we're truly making a difference for people who want to be more private online, and that is incredibly rewarding.

So thank you, to all of you who search with us, all of you who know privacy matters, and all of you who work along side us to show that privacy is not a fringe interest but something we can all have!

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#13
post #9
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Phil, DuckDuckGo employee here - Be sure to use the 'feedback' button that you find on the search results page whenever you feel a search isn't up to standards. Our team has been working hard at increasing relevancy, but the best changes come when users let us know what they need. Since we don't filter bubble results ( https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b... ) results certainly feel differ…

Google has a list of scheduled flights when you put in two airport codes which is useful, doesn't look like DDG does the same.

Google paid $700m to get that functionality though.

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#14
post #9
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Phil, DuckDuckGo employee here - Be sure to use the 'feedback' button that you find on the search results page whenever you feel a search isn't up to standards. Our team has been working hard at increasing relevancy, but the best changes come when users let us know what they need. Since we don't filter bubble results ( https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b... ) results certainly feel differ…

Google has a list of scheduled flights when you put in two airport codes which is useful, doesn't look like DDG does the same.

At DuckDuckGo we've got open-source Instant Answers that currently pull in information from over 1100 sources: (https://duck.co/ia)

If you know of a good data source for scheduled flights you can easily contribute an Instant Answer, or leave the source as a suggestion for our community!

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#15
I couldn't find anything obviously authoritative, but various sources suggested Google does 3500m or so daily searches.

That puts DDG at less than 1%, but their percentage growth is huge. It can't continue forever, but they could be a significant search engine if it doesn't peter out too soon.

I tried DDG several times, but it finally stuck earlier this year. I'm really happy it's available as an alternative.

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#16
post #4

The key for switching to DuckDuckGo for me was to set it as the default searchengine / startpage on all browsers. While the relevance of search results is slightly (noticable) worse than Google, I think the tradeoff between privacy VS result-quality is worth it. Thanks for making such a great product!

Hey Phil, DuckDuckGo employee here - Be sure to use the 'feedback' button that you find on the search results page whenever you feel a search isn't up to standards. Our team has been working hard at increasing relevancy, but the best changes come when users let us know what they need. Since we don't filter bubble results ( https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b... ) results certainly feel differ…

Hey Adam, thanks for the tip! Will do for sure in the future.

Edge cases I have in mind are usually related to indexing of forum posts, where I search for a specific-term (say bookkeeping) and roughly know the Google results of the most important forums by heart, but DDG does not even show them.

Second case I just used yesterday was searching for an exact match for an @gmail address of a priest (for our marriage) where Google had a lot more results than DDG.

Keep up the great work!

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#17
post #4

The key for switching to DuckDuckGo for me was to set it as the default searchengine / startpage on all browsers. While the relevance of search results is slightly (noticable) worse than Google, I think the tradeoff between privacy VS result-quality is worth it. Thanks for making such a great product!

Hey Phil, DuckDuckGo employee here - Be sure to use the 'feedback' button that you find on the search results page whenever you feel a search isn't up to standards. Our team has been working hard at increasing relevancy, but the best changes come when users let us know what they need. Since we don't filter bubble results ( https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b... ) results certainly feel differ…

There was a long HN thread talking about DuckDuckGo results vs Google behavior.

Some people are put off by the fact that you don't substitute synonyms as aggressively as google. A concrete example was "foss [search term]". Google seems to rewrite this to "[open source] foobar", even with bubbling off.

I prefer the duck duck go behavior (and google's aggressive query rewriting drove me nuts back when I used google -- it makes it hard to run precise searches!). After all, if I bothered to type an obscure acronym, I'm looking for results that actually contain the acronym!

Maybe a "did you mean 'open source [search term]'" link at the top of the page, and even a preference toggle to enable aggressive query rewording by default would help.

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#18

    >In addition, the search engine is celebrating a
     combined total of 10 billion searches performed,
     with 4 billion searches conducted in December 2016
     alone.
This can't be right, can it? DDG's been around for years, and nearly half of its total use volume has been in the past month?

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#19
Just trying it now, when you go "back" after clicking Images you go to duckduckgo.com, not the previous page you were on. The url changes, so it's a bit strange.

Results are decent, though the results page seems harder to skim read.

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#20
post #5

I'm a professional data scientist. Apart from donating, how can I support the project? It's my default search engine everywhere now.

As some others have mentioned you can check out https://duckduckhack.com/ our open-source community that powers our Instant Answers (the answers that appear before the search results/ads).

Our community has helped us pull in data from over 1100 sources to make amazing experiences.

The value of this is that you can build out anything you are passionate about. It creates some great niche experiences.

Maybe you want to look up who is in space right now: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=people+in+space&ia=answer

Or you need to look up some NFL games: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=patriots+games&ia=nfl&iai=641

Or you can't remember the details of that card from your Magic The Gathering deck: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mtg+boiling+seas&ia=games&iax=1

We encourage people to build out the answers they want to see!

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