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DuckDuckGo Traffic

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Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#161

Post by Kiro »

soraminazuki wrote: post #127
mda wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The explanation is fluff and has no meaning if they don't give which percentage of queries is answered by which source. e.g. it is probably all bing for any non trivial query. To me, it seems they just want to create an illusion that it is more than a glorified proxy / meta search engine.

I doubt this because DDG usually gives me very different results from ecosia, an actual Bing proxy.

Try various "what is my ip" queries and you will see that the cached IP on results which show it in the snippet is the same on DDG and Bing (and Ecosia), while different on Google.

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#162

Post by FabHK »

frank2 wrote: post #155
adventured wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and now there's a neat new upstart to come along DuckDuckGo is 12 years old. They're far away from being a new upstart. To put that into perspective, AltaVista's prime years only lasted six or seven years (~1996-2002; sold off in 2003). DDG is now one of the oldest independent search engines in Internet history. Their very long-term, very slow, grinding upwards is one of the most amazing aspects of what they're acc…

Microsoft could decide to terminate their access to Bing APIs at any time resulting in DDG’s immediately losing most of their users. DDG does not have their own crawler or index.

And until then, I’ll happily use DDG.

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#163

Post by FabHK »

soheil wrote: post #11
LilBytes wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had very similar experiences, I'd tried DDG several times over the years but around ~12 months ago I found DDG's usability and quality of searches to jump significantly.

I completely disagree on the quality front. I really wanted DDG to be good and I tried sticking with it for a while. I found usability (reads keyboard shortcuts, special keywords, etc.) a breath of fresh air compared to Google. But it's no substitute for the significant lack of quality results. For when you don't really need search it works great.

I must not be really needing search much, because I almost never switch to another search engine (let alone google, which would be my last resort).

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#164

Post by FabHK »

mda wrote: post #114
kucing wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing. Hmm I…

The explanation is fluff and has no meaning if they don't give which percentage of queries is answered by which source. e.g. it is probably all bing for any non trivial query. To me, it seems they just want to create an illusion that it is more than a glorified proxy / meta search engine.

Yet, an anonymising proxy with added functionality is valuable to some people, believe it or not!

It’s like saying “google just wants to create the illusion that they are more than a glorified frontend for a big iterative eigenvector solver”.

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#165

Post by FabHK »

OJFord wrote: post #82

I've used DDG for some years now, and never had the problem switching and needing !g that others describe. (I use things like !w to search specific actual sites, but not to change global search engine.) The only thing that bugs me is regional result relevance. It gives you a toggle on/off for present country by IP; as far as I can tell it has no effect. I get /en-us/ and amazon.com as (all) the top results whether it…

Toggling the country gives me completely different results, from language to eg specific wiki or amazon site if you use !w or !a.

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#166

Post by avian »

severine wrote: post #105
avian wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do they sync with Firefox Sync? No. > Do they work on Firefox for Android? Yes.

I think akvadrako above[1] has it right, they appeared on my mobile phone on sync, as they are bookmarks. Again, I think , I'm not sure ;) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22115461

There are two things being confused here.

I was thinking about OpenSearch custom search engines (being deprecated apparently as another comment notes, these appear on desktop as icons under the search input field "This time search with" and similarly in Android as icons above the on-screen keyboard. These definitely don't sync.

The other thing are bookmarks with the "keyword" property set. These do indeed sync, like other bookmarks.

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#168

Post by agumonkey »

teeray wrote: post #14

Bang commands[0] really sealed DDG for me. I know Firefox had install-your-own search plugins forever, but the total lack of friction of typing “!yt badgerbadgerbadger” to get specifically YouTube results was fantastic. !g (search on Google) also makes it far easier to switch. Don’t like the results? Prefix !g and try again. My other favorites: !sr [name of subreddit] - much faster than “reddit.com/r/[name]” !r - Red…

sadly they removed scihub's bang

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#169

Post by dfrankow »

AJ007 wrote: post #156
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I mentally give DDG a harder time than it deserves. When I search something and don't see the result I want I think "Wow ddg is shit, I'll try this on google" And then I still don't see what I want and think "The info I am looking for doesn't exist or my search was wrong" Despite both failing I tend to be a lot more lenient to google.

Bing and Yandex are worth trying too. I just had a total failure from a Google search yesterday, where the official site for a piece of software wasn’t on the first 3 pages. I went over to bing and it was #1. I’m getting to the point where I predict a search will fail on google and I go to another engine. This never happened before, even in the Demand Media content farm debacle where horse shit ehow ranking for milli…

Isn't ddg Bing results?

Re: DuckDuckGo Traffic

#170

Post by eitland »

Theizestooke wrote: post #140

Does DDG also have stats for how much they spend on social media marketing aka hype stories on Hacker News?

I can assure you that I besides being a happy user I'm completely unaffiliated to ddg :-)

I guess the rest of the social media marketing as well is just another benefit of being nice to your power users.

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