DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#91

Post by nitrogen » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 7:54 PM UTC

throwaway91111 wrote: post #73

JoelTheSuperior wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thousand times this. Initially I wasn't a fan if I'm perfectly honest, but once I got my head around such brilliant things as the bang syntax I've been finding Google almost awkward to use by comparison. Being able to search Wikipedia with !w is brilliant.

This is built into most browsers--you don't need to forward the query through a third party.

For the curious, that's what the search "keyword" is for. Over time, Firefox has made it harder to add new search engines and find/modify their settings, but it definitely still works.

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#92

Post by boomboomsubban » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 8:00 PM UTC

WhitneyLand wrote: post #85

AdamSC1 wrote: post #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 incredib…

DDG is a great success story, I wish the whole team the best. I wonder how an exit will play out though. A big factor with DDG is user trust - that seems to limit the list potential buyers to the few that could credibly maintain that trust. Then there is the IPO route, but that has it's own challenges. You could argue that up until now DDG has had no competition because Google doesn't think it's worth raising its han…

What promises has Microsoft kept that would make me consider trusting privacy to them? A sale to Microsoft would mean the decision to use duckduckgo would rely solely on search performance, and as much as I love bangs it's not a better search engine.

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#93

Post by zokula » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 8:00 PM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #61

rangibaby wrote: post #8

I switched to DDG as my default search everywhere a few months ago, and I recommend everyone does. The results are passable and when they aren't there is always !g

I am curious why you recommend everyone else switch since you say "The results are passable." That's not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Agreed just use Startpage.com for better results and privacy than you can get from DDG.

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#94

Post by adanto6840 » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 8:02 PM UTC

panic wrote: post #87

WhitneyLand wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG is a great success story, I wish the whole team the best. I wonder how an exit will play out though. A big factor with DDG is user trust - that seems to limit the list potential buyers to the few that could credibly maintain that trust. Then there is the IPO route, but that has it's own challenges. You could argue that up until now DDG has had no competition because Google doesn't think it's worth raising its han…

Why would DuckDuckGo need to exit? Are they losing money?

A quick Google search indicates that they've taken on ~$3M in funding. Depending on their revenues & expenses, that may mean that their investors aren't clamoring for quick returns. But at some point most investors do want to see a ROI/exit.

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#95

Post by adventurer » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 8:07 PM UTC

BEEdwards wrote: post #56

I want to like DDG, but the results are never good. Much like when I use bing, I more often than not I must re search for whatever I want on google to find it.

I have used it for about a month. I feel like it may be good for most people, but google is far more precise for hard to find pages and answers to programming questions, error strings, etc.

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#96

Post by majkinetor » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 8:22 PM UTC

I wonder why DDG bang search is praised like its a first time phenomena ?

What ? ... did people live in a cave all this time ? It existed for more then a decade all around. Some examples include early Opera, chrome, vimium plugin, Surfraw (linux CLI search tool) etc...

Anyway, DDG is refreshing. You can even turn off adds in the options. Google may be a great search engine but as far as I am concerned, it can delete 'don't be evil' phrase from its mission statement.

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#97

Post by striking » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 8:23 PM UTC

yclept wrote: post #28

Congratulations on the big growth. I'm annoyed that I can't set DDG has the default search engine in Chrome (Android). I hold a bookmark though so 'duc' autocompletes to duckduckgo. Not too inconvenient.

There's a patch floating around the interwebs that lets you do just that. But that's a real pain.

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#98

Post by grey-area » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 8:23 PM UTC

AdamSC1 wrote: post #34

gingerlime wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how this might affect privacy, or maybe you're doing it already, but couldn't you guys sample every time someone runs a search and then the same search with !g ?

Hi Gingerlime, Thanks for the suggestion. Part of the reason we don't do this is the returned search results on Google are Google's commercial property. To use them in such a capacity would require us to reach a commercial agreement with them. These agreements come with stipulations that we don't feel represent the privacy interests of our users, so we don't pursue such agreements. The other reason, is because of the…

I think the suggestion was more that you identify specific search urls which did not return a good result (hence the user went off to google). You could do this anonymously without tracking anyone or their usage of google or other search engines, or looking at the results on google.

As a DDG user I'd be really happy if you did this and think it would be the best way of identifying searches I'm unhappy with. I go to google now only if I'm not happy with the results from DDG.

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#99

Post by severine » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 8:28 PM UTC

AdamSC1 wrote: post #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 incredib…

I use DDG Lite with Dillo, a fast non-Javascript GUI browser, but lately (I'd say since the first week of January, according to this message [1] in Dillo's mailing list), I'm unable to visit the search results using Dillo's native search box.

Instead of sending me to example.com, DDG redirects to a weird constructed address [2]). If I go to duckduckgo.com/lite and search there, it works fine. Any ideas? What would be the best (eh, sorry) place to post this?

Of course, thanks for your great work, and bangs are amazing!

[1] http://lists.dillo.org/pipermail/dillo-dev/2017-January/0110...

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.co...

Re: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

#100

Post by zegerjan » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 8:30 PM UTC

decasteve wrote: post #23

I've been using DuckDuckGo since @yegg's first announcement of it (on reddit iirc). The relevance of the results compared to their competitors' has been noticeably improving over the years. When a search doesn't quite give me what I'm looking for, I prepend !sp on my query (to use startpage.com). I use this less and less and for most things DDG gets me where I need to go. I'm a huge fan. I'm thankful services like th…

I still insert `!g` in about 25% percent of my searches. Loved to see a metric on how many people do the same or append it on the search box after seeing the results.

I like DDG a lot, but I feel that Google knowing so much about me prevents it from showing ruby gems over ruby lang search results. Must say, this has improved greatly last year, but I don't trust DDG just yet fully.