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DuckDuckGo is blowing up

duckduckgo.com

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Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#181

Post by ef4 »

dfc wrote: post #174
webwright wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making money with a search engine is a solved problem. Making a search engine worth switching to is not-- that's what they are (and should be) focused on. I'd wager their investors are telling them the same thing.

This was news to me. What is the solution to making money as a privacy preserving search engine?

You can still make money off of targeted ads. The difference is you can only target the current query.

I also think DuckDuckGo hands out affiliate links to places like Amazon.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#182

Post by duncanj »

Give me a quick (or configurable, or special URL) that includes a "search on Google Scholar" link and I will switch from Google. Ever since Google's visual refresh that removed the menu item for search on google scholar, I've lost one of my timesavers.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#183

Post by jonstjohn »

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…

I hear a lot of people say that google search results are worse than they used to be - personally I have a hard time telling. What's interesting, though, is that nobody is doing search better, which suggests that it a very tough problem to solve, and even with all the resources Google has, they aren't doing it as good as it could be.

So my question is - what is google doing wrong?

Has their search algorithm become worse?

Has the web become more complex?

Have people just become lazy and feel like they should never have to dig beyond the first 10 results to find what they're looking for?

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#184

Post by whackberry »

Hi, I've only been using DuckDuckGo lately and I love it. Search quality is so impressive and the respect for privacy is very welcome. I hope it is able to maintain this independent feel and not sell out like others did.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#185

Post by dmoy »

mironathetin wrote: post #119
memset wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way cool. Going to try using this as my default search engine for a while. I really really like the "alternative to" feature. What could I do to help you get better at alternatives which are not as popular? (eg, "alternative to cheetahmail" or "alternative to grubhub" or "alternative to xkcd"?) Also, what kind of feedback would you need to help improve the tech-related searches? Like "ebcdic table" or "1010 in hex"?

I agree, DDG is very cool. As I understood a while ago that Google tracks my search habits, I avoid using it. I went back to WebCrawler, Cuil, Altvista, Bing... None of these compare to DDG in terms of quality. Great job. It is time to get an alternative to Google. Don't be evil is just a silly marketing gag.

Does Bing not track your searches?

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#186

Post by jzycrzy »

I've been using DuckDuckGo more and more lately since google added a redirect[1] for any link clicked in their search results a couple months ago.

I'm in China and most links I click on google don't load. Perhaps because China is messing with DNS queries to google.com and trying to limit the amount of data they collect on their citizens.

[1] The google link for duckduckgo search result first hits this link, and this is where the pageload errors occur: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#187

Post by nl »

Wed 28-Mar-2012 1,518,581 direct 9,580,029 api 225,161 bot

Am I reading this right? DDG does ~6 times as much traffic in API requests compared to search requests?

That makes a pretty significant difference to the monetisation strategy!

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#188

Post by jsz0 »

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…

Can you guys talk Apple into adding it as a preset search-bar option in Safari? It's kind of a pain to add it yourself or get out of the habit of using the search-bar

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#189

Post by thematt »

demetris wrote: post #26
pubby wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it were possible to take Bing’s search results, throw a handful of people at them and match the quality of Google’s results, Google would not be where it is today. That is the main problem I see with Duck Duck Go. The quality of its search results depends on Bing. Duck Duck Go can do things to offer something better than Bing, but not that much better that matches Google’s quality.

Result quality is only one part of the equation. Features is another, which is where DDG seems to be making a land-grab for. Users seem to be responding to this approach.
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