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DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries

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Re: DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries

#171

Post by spurgu »

TobTobXX wrote: post #140
sneeuwpopsneeuw wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always search for things technical or non-technical there first. If it does not give any result or when I know it's very technical I simply add !g to the end (but you can add it anywhere) and it automatically searches the same thing in Google. Some examples of things I personally thing DDG could improve / is different then Google: - DDG gives the feeling they prefer…

> - indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video. Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so I searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos only photos and articles. Google found a few videos including once on a dutch news website. If I know that I am searching a YouTube video, I usually search directly on youtube…

One problem with this approach is that Youtube's search just feels so bad (at least compared to what you expect out of Google) and what's worse, they limit the number of search results. So you get around 10 somewhat related results and then they just instantly stop and you get some "you might like these videos as well" results. Frustrates me to no end and I think there could be a great opportunity in somehow indexing videos properly and creating a search engine around it. Then again you'd think Google would've done this but maybe they aren't able to. But in any case I'd prefer an endless stream of semi-related videos compared to their 10 results.

Re: DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries

#172

Post by spurgu »

FalconSensei wrote: post #152
nostromo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

!g is some sort of brilliant marketing. Me: "I don't see what I expected. I'll try Google." Me two seconds later 9 out of 10 times: "Oh, Google also sucks for this query. Oh well."

That is brilliant indeed. Although I don't understand why I would use '!g' instead of just 'g'+tab/whitespace, as that would use google as the browser search engine - if you manually added 'g' as google's keyword, or if you used google enough that when you type 'g' it interprets as possible google

Yeah or "y ". BUT! You can't do that in Firefox, which is one of the many reasons I switched back to Chrome (Brave) after trying to like Firefox for a couple of months. Chrome just does UX so much better. I really really miss containers though but Google has little incentive to offer that.

Re: DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries

#173

Post by l0b0 »

Fantastic! I wonder if anyone has researched how quickly users can find what they are looking for on different search engines, after a super quick introduction to the basic controls. Of course, everyone has been primed by whatever search engine they have used the most, so that would have to be accounted for.

A particularly common result on DDG which bugs me is whenever I'm searching for something which I'm positive will be answered on Stack Overflow the first page of results includes one Stack Overflow question and the rest of the results are from other sites. This can be annoying when the search is basically "how to convert X to Y", and the only Stack Overflow result is "how to convert Y to X". The similar results for each site shown on Google is a killer app in these situations, and is probably the main reason I "!g".

Re: DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries

#174

Post by FalconSensei »

spurgu wrote: post #172
FalconSensei wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is brilliant indeed. Although I don't understand why I would use '!g' instead of just 'g'+tab/whitespace, as that would use google as the browser search engine - if you manually added 'g' as google's keyword, or if you used google enough that when you type 'g' it interprets as possible google

Yeah or "y ". BUT! You can't do that in Firefox, which is one of the many reasons I switched back to Chrome (Brave) after trying to like Firefox for a couple of months. Chrome just does UX so much better. I really really miss containers though but Google has little incentive to offer that.

Agree! I tried to switch to Firefox many times. But the usability (for me) is nowhere near chrome/edge chromium.

You can do this on Firefox, by adding bookmarking google.com and adding 'g' as a keyword. But there's no way to manage your keywords/search engines, and even adding it is more involved than on chrome/edge

Re: DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries

#175

Post by SlimShady747 »

kaszanka wrote: post #128
divbzero wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the comments regarding indexing should be attributed to Bing, the underlying search engine that DDG uses currently. I too switch to !g occasionally when searching particular niches.

I use !sp (Startpage). It's basically a Google proxy, if I understand correctly.

As far as I know, not anymore.

Re: DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries

#176

Post by Shorel »

ravedave5 wrote: post #10

I've been switched to DDG for about 4 months now. I am loving the Ads I get in youtube now that google doesn't know what I am interested in they have noting to do with anything I care about. It's wonderful. DDG still has a way to go for really technical queries. I just can't get the same results about this error or that in Java. Until then I'm 100% DDG for personal and 100% google for work.

I don't understand what's the issue with the technical queries.

Are they ambiguous? Are they paraphrasing the error description?

Because for me, most of the time, I just paste the error message into DDG, and the relevant Stack Overflow answer, not question page, the actual answer, is in DDG search results for me to use and fix my problem.

This is actually one of my favourites DDG features, along with currency conversion.

Re: DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries

#177

Post by dang »

Tokkemon wrote: post #29
ronnier wrote: post #26

I’m using ddg, pihole, unbound, ublock, signal. Deleted twitter, Facebook. Looking to move away from google. Things just feel, cleaner this way. Still a long way to go

Great, do you want a cookie?

Please stop posting comments that break the site guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries

#178

Post by ColinHayhurst »

randomstring wrote: post #84

I would estimate that greater than 90% of that traffic is bot traffic. Having run two web search engines in the past: search.netscape.com (pre-google) and blekko.com. Robots accounted for > 80% of traffic at Netscape (around 3M searches/day in 2000 IIRC) and definitely more than 80% at blekko. Maybe 90% or more. Some traffic is obviously bot traffic (single source IP, common patterns, obvious bot useragents) and then…

At Mojeek which also has it's own crawler/index, like Blekko, we see around 80% bot searches. That % has also grown as we grow.

Would syndication search services, like DDG or Startpage, see a higher level of bot traffic than a crawler search engine? We don't know and it could depend on several factors. Bot traffic handling is certainly an ongoing and important challenge.

Re: DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries

#179

Post by ricardo81 »

randomstring wrote: post #106
ecommerceguy wrote: post #101

FWIW, we have witnessed a noticeable increase in ddg derived traffic across all properties.

Wait, you're getting referrer strings with DDG in them? How is that private?

Referer is passed at the hostname level, so no query string etc. At least some site logs say as much.

Re: DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries

#180

Post by f1refly »

pixxel wrote: post #96
f1refly wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might enjoy invidious. It's a frontend for youtube that cuts 99% of the bloat and show videos directly in your html5 player. It even supports subscriptions without a google account!

Is it still running ok. Didn’t the main instance shutdown or something? Sorry, I forget the specifics.

The instance of the original dev has shut down because he seized developement, but the project ist still doing fine. There's multiple public instances, but those are often unable to handle all user requests and get rate limited by google every now and then. I'm currently using invidious.tube, it has a good "real" uptime in my opinion (the site is up the whole time but might have issues like described above). I'm considering just self hosting should things get worse.
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