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DuckDuckGo is blowing up

duckduckgo.com

11–20 of 219 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#11
People care about privacy and not being tracked. I predict Google's arms race with Facebook to profit more from user's data will augment this growth. And/or dampen that arms race.

That's why I search with DuckDuckGo by default (previously Scroogle).

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#12
Incidentally, I switched my default search to ddg 2 days ago. Use !g a lot but also ddg native frequently. Starting to get a feel for what type of search will benefit more from DDGs extras.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#13
pg's analysis was spot on, then [1]. I recently realized DuckDuckGo would be a hit when a hacker friend who does not read HN started using DDG as his primary search engine.

To me, this means it is out there. I switched too, at least for a while, and now I use both google and DDG, constantly having the impression that DDG's results are getting better and better.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#14

if i get that right, people are doing a lot more API calls than direct searches... Which begs the questions of (i) who they are, (ii) what they're doing, and (iii) how this can be monetized?

Maybe these numbers include search requests from browser-search fields and similar. Otherwise I would be very interested in those sources, too.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#16
post #9

Wow, thats a great curve. Just wanted to throw in my personal experience with DuckDuckGo, and it doesn't necessarily reflect on DuckDuckGo specifically, however: After seeing them pop up here once or twice quite recently I thought I'd give it a go, I opened up preferences in Chrome and switched my default search over to DDG. It felt good, made a nice change but was certainly a bit "odd". I found what I wanted, most o…

I generally stick to Google for programming related searches and use DDG for the rest. Hopefully DDG improves to the point where I can use it 100% of the time.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#17
!g is the google killer. I switched to DDG, but kept drifting back to see if Google was doing better. I find myself using !g less and less, as I get used to the result format.

At the moment, DDG reminds me of Firefox (or was it WaterSquirrel then?) back-in-the-day. Its something that "feels" better than what is the standard - and it's something that I go on and on about to other nerds, when I'm drunk ;)

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#18
I've been using DDG for quite a few months now and in general it works well. However I still find myself adding that "!g" at times when they find no results, and seeing what I was looking for at Google. I am also a bit disappointed with the "I'm feeling ducky"-results which are rarely what a person is likely to be looking for as soon as you get more complex than one word.

But that's the negative parts, and otherwise the positive outweighs those by far. I love the bang-syntax and I found myself using their information-box directly on the search page very often, mostly for converting currency.

I think better results will come with time and increasing usage, and I wish them good luck in the future.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#19
It's interesting to see how many requests are coming from the API, offhand I can't think of any uses that I've come into contact with. Does anyone know who is using the API?

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#20
DuckDuckGo is definitely pulling users from Google. By mimicking Facebook, Google has lost its mojo. Stepped right into the "social" honeypot. No news. The more interesting thing is the fantastic feeling more and more people have: that Facebook and Google will take eachother down the spiral.

As for the Google part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction, but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Especially if DuckDuckGo and other engines continue to get better while practicing their principles instead of a crude mixture of addictive search quality, addictedness to bucks and PR along the lines of "Don't be evil".

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