For what it's worth, DuckDuckGo has .25% global market share on desktops:
https://netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx
In the US, it's .66%.
Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
131–140 of 252 posts
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#132You know what can stop google? a search engine that assumes I want every word in my query, or even better a search engine that honors a string in quotes to mean these words in this order. When did google stop doing this? edit: This wouldn't stop google, it would just make that part of my life as easy as it was 10 years ago.
Google never stopped doing this. I use quotes all the time for exact matches, and it always works. (Unless there are zero results, in which case it says so and falls back to unquoted.) In fact, they were pretty public about this being the solution when they dropped "+" to mean required... to just surround in quotes instead.
There have been many times in the last few years where I searched a section of a complex error message, and got results that were almost the same thing, but with one word or a few characters changed. I suspect the reason has to do with how they normalize and store ngrams for making results faster, but I would much rather have a slower response with accurate results.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#133There's an unusual amount of pro-DDG articles on Hacker News, half of them are PR fluff, and I don't understand why they keep getting upvoted.
Because Google Search sucks these days. (To be fair, this is not by any fault of Google themselves. Rather, like any monoculture, Google Search is especially vulnerable to external attacks, such as from SEO's trying to game the system.) If anything, DDG today is a lot closer to the quality Google Search itself used to provide back in the 2000s, before it was SEO-gamed to death.
I mostly agree with you about Google search results, however I think the decreasing quality is more due to political influence and corruption, rather than SEO-games.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet still it is Bing search + Bing ads.
DuckDuckGo do have their own crawler, how much it’s used I don’t know.
My guess, <1%. I would be happy to be refuted with real data. Creating and maintaining a global scale high quality search engine requires a huge team with billion dollar level resources. They have neither, for now.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#135Back in the day, before I just defaulted to using Google, I remember checking multiple search engines to find the thing I was looking for. You'd check Yahoo/Google/Lycos, try a couple of different phrasings, and then if that didn't work try searching on a few other search engines. Somewhere along the way, Google had won me over, because I almost always found my answer. I had stopped even considering other search engi…
DDG is great; particularly for tech related topics, as it doesn't get skewed by whatever I was last talking about in corporate (gmail) email. One of the things I have noticed in recent years is how bad google is getting. It is definitely dropping the ball in many ways. Every behemouth looks unstoppable right before it gets stopped; remember when MS bailed out Apple? Bet they never expected trillion dollar apple.
FWIIW qwant and yandex (in english) are both excellent as well.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#136You know what can stop google? a search engine that assumes I want every word in my query, or even better a search engine that honors a string in quotes to mean these words in this order. When did google stop doing this? edit: This wouldn't stop google, it would just make that part of my life as easy as it was 10 years ago.
Documentation suggests Google never stopped doing this. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en suggests "phrase inside quotes" is still exact match. And if you put a single word in "quotes", that indicates to Google the word must be included in the results (I determined this by searching for something where some words were omitted, then clicking the small "Must include:" link under a result and not…
You can go test it for yourself: it definitely no longer works!
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#137As long as DDG is not traded publicly it will do just fine. Investors would inevitably be screaming for more growth and ultimately force them to comprise their current values.
They're still beholden by their VC's, who most likely forced them to purge a lot of their !bangs not too long ago.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't escape Gmail because you'd lose your address, and you can't escape Maps because the alternatives suck. On the other hand if I don't like Supermarket-X, I can go to Supermarket-Y
Or your were lucky enough to start using Gmail with your own domain, when Google Apps was still free for up to 10 users, and can still use it for free.
Google Apps with a custom domain was once free for as many email accounts as you were approved for. There are a handful out there with lots more than 10 free accounts. They don’t get support, have less space provided, and can’t use the outlook connector so it’s not an equal comparison. It’s nice that google hasn’t changed this on their users.
Zoho recently restricted their free custom domain service for email. Not sure who is the best free option out there now.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#139You know what can stop google? a search engine that assumes I want every word in my query, or even better a search engine that honors a string in quotes to mean these words in this order. When did google stop doing this? edit: This wouldn't stop google, it would just make that part of my life as easy as it was 10 years ago.
I'm also annoyed by this. Google tries to out-smart the user and often yields garbage or generic popular crap even when looking for something very specific. I want my quotes back too! An even bigger issue: Due to SEO and ranking benefits for popular sites, it's basically impossible to discover quality content by smaller sites/blogs via Google. Unless you go to like page 10+, where you also get a lot of irrelevant stu…
With regards to your last point, ive had some good luck with millionshort.com, which lets you remove some portion of top sites from your results.
Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway
#140Back in the day, before I just defaulted to using Google, I remember checking multiple search engines to find the thing I was looking for. You'd check Yahoo/Google/Lycos, try a couple of different phrasings, and then if that didn't work try searching on a few other search engines. Somewhere along the way, Google had won me over, because I almost always found my answer. I had stopped even considering other search engi…
What I've found with using DDG more and more is it's made me be a bit smarter in how I search. I, personally, found Google almost made me lazy in just throwing 2 or 3 words and seeing what comes back. I'm a little more specific in my queries now and it's gotten way better since doing so.