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DuckDuckGo Direct queries per day (28 day average)

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Re: DuckDuckGo Direct queries per day (28 day average)

#121

Post by haldujai »

Part of the reason Google has seemingly perfect search results is because of the bubble, and because it knows us so well. It's quite the dilemma of whether the loss in privacy is worth the better search results.

For example when I search 'Egypt' on Google all of the search results (except for Wikipedia) are on the competing political factions, something I've read extensively out of interest. The same search on DuckDuckGo results in a mix of travel, encyclopaedia, a dictionary.com definition of the word Egypt, linkbait, and a couple of relevant news articles.

The trade-off here is I would have to start being much more specific with my search queries to get what I want out of DDG, and often times I can't put into words what I want so being specific is not an option, Google knows what I want to see.

It will be interesting to see how long this lasts after the next big media fad comes and everyone forgets about the NSA.

Re: DuckDuckGo Direct queries per day (28 day average)

#122

Post by marssaxman »

charlieflowers wrote: post #106
marssaxman wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much endearing and cute as it is just confusing and weird; it makes the project sound like it must be kind of a joke, not a serious attempt at building a high quality search engine. I don't understand what they were going for.

I can see that, but remember that "Google" and "Yahoo" hardly sounded like uber-mature names when they came out either. They sound like serious products/companies now, but that's merely because of their sucsess.

A fair point. I still think "Yahoo" is a dorky name, but perhaps that's because I don't really understand why they still exist. Google, on the other hand, has earned my respect and thus I have stopped noticing what a silly name they have.

Re: DuckDuckGo Direct queries per day (28 day average)

#123

Post by nilved »

greghinch wrote: post #64

I like DDG in theory a lot, and have switched my default search to it, but admittedly still end up going back to Google a lot, as DDG often doesn't bring up what I'm looking for, whereas it'll be the first result on Google.

I use !g more than I type standard queries, but I use !g once for every hundred times I type !yt, !w, !gh, &c. The proper search results are sometimes inferior to Google, but the bang queries make it more useful for me regardless.

Re: DuckDuckGo Direct queries per day (28 day average)

#125

Post by graue »

haldujai wrote: post #121

Part of the reason Google has seemingly perfect search results is because of the bubble, and because it knows us so well. It's quite the dilemma of whether the loss in privacy is worth the better search results. For example when I search 'Egypt' on Google all of the search results (except for Wikipedia) are on the competing political factions, something I've read extensively out of interest. The same search on DuckDu…

Interesting. My experience is different; I never use Google Search signed in (except once in a blue moon by accident) and clear their cookies every time I restart my browser (daily, at a minimum). Consequently, they don't know that much about me.

I still find their results better than DDG's, unfortunately, and reverted my default search from DDG to Google after I found I was prefixing almost every search with !g.

But unlike you, I rarely search for anything as general as "Egypt". I wouldn't even think to. For general info about a whole country I would go to Wikipedia or Wikivoyage or similar instead. I hit Google when searching for something more specific, like info on a particular protest in Egypt, or monad libraries for JavaScript.

Re: DuckDuckGo Direct queries per day (28 day average)

#127

Post by mchusma »

marssaxman wrote: post #122
charlieflowers wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see that, but remember that "Google" and "Yahoo" hardly sounded like uber-mature names when they came out either. They sound like serious products/companies now, but that's merely because of their sucsess.

A fair point. I still think "Yahoo" is a dorky name, but perhaps that's because I don't really understand why they still exist. Google, on the other hand, has earned my respect and thus I have stopped noticing what a silly name they have.

I think one fewer syllable and fact that neither yahoo or google were commonly written (or said) make them better names. I use DDG, but think the name is terrible. It also can't become a verb as easily, as google has.

Re: DuckDuckGo Direct queries per day (28 day average)

#128

Post by haldujai »

graue wrote: post #125
haldujai wrote: post #121

Part of the reason Google has seemingly perfect search results is because of the bubble, and because it knows us so well. It's quite the dilemma of whether the loss in privacy is worth the better search results. For example when I search 'Egypt' on Google all of the search results (except for Wikipedia) are on the competing political factions, something I've read extensively out of interest. The same search on DuckDu…

Interesting. My experience is different; I never use Google Search signed in (except once in a blue moon by accident) and clear their cookies every time I restart my browser (daily, at a minimum). Consequently, they don't know that much about me. I still find their results better than DDG's, unfortunately, and reverted my default search from DDG to Google after I found I was prefixing almost every search with !g. But…

I find the main usefulness of general queries like 'Egypt' or 'Syria' is in current events. I don't know what's happening in a country or about a specific subject/object (i.e. 'Xbox') and a general query gives me a wide variety of information about that subject, after which I can be more specific.

Google has become my gateway into current events. I don't read news or blog sites often so I'm not sure of what's going on, by querying a general topic I am instantly presented with a multitude of topics from a variety of sources that I can then follow up on with specific results.

Google's cookies and data about me help it select subtopics I'd be interested in. I.e. I don't care that Kuwait has offered Egypt an aid package (found on DDG) but I do care about the new protests.

Re: DuckDuckGo Direct queries per day (28 day average)

#129

Post by sp332 »

HyprMusic wrote: post #111
tobylane wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eHow themselves were bad for neutrality, as it was poor quality link-bait. It's too qualitative to describe the line, but the widespread disdain for eHow is a good requirement for the future.

I personally don't believe results should be removed or altered based on human judgement. What if I decide to start a competing service that Gabriel takes a dislike to? Or decide to start a hate site for DDG[1]? Do they not deserve a place on the internet? Is it up to one person to decide this? For neutrality to work it needs to be neutral for absolutely everyone, or atleast that's how I see it. [1] These are purely…

Of course all search engines are "based on human judgement". Is it different if you write a fancy algorithm that detects these and removes them vs. just deleting the site from the index? I don't think there's a difference.

Re: DuckDuckGo Direct queries per day (28 day average)

#130

Post by gilgoomesh »

mehwoot wrote: post #126

Wow I didn't realise how little traffic they got previously. They must have had like... 5,000 regular users? Hopefully a lot of the new traffic sticks around.

This data covers roughly 3 years. Obviously, they started small but they've been around 1.5 million queries per day for a while.

The "28 days" in the title is a little misleading. It's just the smoothing applied to the graph, not the total time period.

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