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DuckDuckGo is blowing up

duckduckgo.com

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Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#91

Post by pnathan »

I use DDG a lot.

The reality is, it's not as tuned a search engine as Google is. However, I find it to be a more serendipitous search engine. It's better in breadth than G, IMO. That is to say, the top hit on Google is more precise if I want a specific thing, but the breadth of results on DDG is much more useful than Google in general.

As a matter of fact, it reminds me of the '90s, where a search could teach you more than just the one thing you were looking for.

I like it... most of the time. :-)

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#92

Post by xpose2000 »

It's great to hear that DDG is doing well. The problem is that I will never switch over to it due to its shortcomings compared to Google and even Bing. I tried to give it a go for a day or so, but quickly realized the results being returned were not good enough.

1) It's not as accurate as Google. Sometimes DDG might return a better result (such as https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa), but 9/10 times Google is much more accurate.

2) DDG is playing catchup to a search engine that has hundreds of employees and a 10+ year head start. The types of queries DDG is trying to solve now were likely solved years ago and have been finely tuned numerous times.

3) I think this good video http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-qualit... about sums up the type of problems they are solving now and how advanced their platform is. Google is tweaking an edge-case scenario that is only .1% of their traffic. That is more traffic than all of DDG.

4) If DDG is all about respecting privacy and not tracking users, then use Google or Bing in incognito mode. Problem solved.

I'm not trying to be negative, but all signs point to a losing battle.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#93

Post by zbuc »

I like the concept of DDG but unfortunately the results just aren't there yet...

Look at the search results for "Google Verbatim Mode" on DDG vs Google.

On Google, all results are actually about the "Verbatim" search mode on Google. We even get results like "How to set Verbatim mode as default on Google Chrome" with actual instructions.

On DDG, we instead get a really crappy blog article as the first result, and some unrelated junk about Google Earth DirectX and Windows 8. There's one result that asks the question most people searching for that query would want answered, "I would like to be able to use verbatim mode as standard". However... it's a link to a newsgroup posting with no answers, unlike the Google results which actually provided links to blog postings with the answer.

So, I'm going to use Verbatim mode on Google for now, now that I know how to activate it by default... Let me know if you guys work these issues out, I'd love to use DDG, but it's just not returning valuable results reliably yet.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#94

Post by praxeologist »

mrspeaker wrote: post #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 ;)

I get into using DDG sometimes, then run into a batch of wanting to use !g and just switch the engine in FF and forget to come back until I read some story on HN ;)

It kind of irks me that DDG is still asking if I meant [similar sounding children's book to my business with 3 different letters] when !g stopped doing that months ago. It also has my psycho competitor's defamatory website ranking #8 when this page should have crappy SEO with google.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#95

Post by moultano »

pushingbits wrote: post #65
geoffw8 wrote: 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 find that I am slowly losing confidence in Google. What I often do is input searches in the form: "general term", "specific term", then click on a link and immediately do a find for the specific term I searched for. In the last few months, the specific term I searched for often does not exist on the linked site at all, which I find quite annoying. I tried bing a couple of times, but the results are even worse. Mayb…

Would love to see some example queries to debug if you have them handy. (You can check your search history https://www.google.com/history/ to jog your memory if you have it turned on.)

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#96

Post by FreeFull »

true_religion wrote: post #67
coderdude wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[1998] Google is definitely pulling users from Yahoo. By mimicking Alta Vista, Yahoo has lost its mojo. Stepped right into the "portal" honeypot. No news. The more interesting thing is the fantastic feeling more and more people have: that Alta Vista and Yahoo will take eachother down the spiral. As for the Yahoo part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction, but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Espe…

One difference in this story is.... Google was vertically integrated from the start: They sent out their own bots to scan the internet, they had their own reverse index, and created their own algorithm. I'm not sure about DDGs backend---but if people use the g! tag, its almost as if DDG is simple chrome for Google. Maybe that'll be the future: Google will become the maker of engines, and let everyone else make the ca…

As far as I know, DDG uses both data from other search engines (Google, Bing) as well as its own crawling bots. If they only used their own crawlers, with the current size of the internet it would take a long time for them to get a good amount of data.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#97

Post by mike-cardwell »

aidos wrote: post #78
white_devil wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that you have investors, they'll expect you to multiply DDG's worth. So how do you make money with it?

There are sponsored links - like on Google.

Also, he uses affiliate programs. So if a link in the search results goes to Amazon for example, he'll add his affiliate code to the link.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#98

Post by jlarocco »

xpose2000 wrote: post #92

It's great to hear that DDG is doing well. The problem is that I will never switch over to it due to its shortcomings compared to Google and even Bing. I tried to give it a go for a day or so, but quickly realized the results being returned were not good enough. 1) It's not as accurate as Google. Sometimes DDG might return a better result (such as https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa ), but 9/10 times Goog…

As a counterexample for number one, I've found DDG to be as good or better than Google on almost everything. The only place Google really beats it is in mailing list archives. DDG doesn't seem to crawl sites like gmane.

Numbers two and three don't make any sense to me as reasons not to use DDG. Using those criteria nobody would have switched to Google because they were just some college guys, while AltaVista and Yahoo have a big head start and huge departments working on search...

Number four is simply too inconvenient. I could go through the trouble of switching to incognito mode every time I needed to search, or I could just use DDG.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#99

Post by umjames »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #59

Thank you all! (I'm the founder.) In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things we're working on are better programming queries ( https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html -- one of my new favorites https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa ) and speed. For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to…

Congrats! Go Philly-based startups!!!!

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#100

Post by RichClaxton »

spodek wrote: post #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).

That's why I switched from Google, the !bang feature is something I could not live without now.
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