I switched earlier this year. It takes some time to get used to it. I used to !g often. It doesn't feel as intuitive at knowing what you are looking like Google. Addresses and map integration is not that good either and does not come even close to Google. It is a good enough. I have their app on my phone as my search tool, which I miss Google maps more often.
Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
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Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#22I switched earlier this year. It takes some time to get used to it. I used to !g often. It doesn't feel as intuitive at knowing what you are looking like Google. Addresses and map integration is not that good either and does not come even close to Google. It is a good enough. I have their app on my phone as my search tool, which I miss Google maps more often.
I've found that Google is better when you're doing research and your net is wide (e.g., rectal cancer incidence in Hispanics). Searching for specific and/or popular things works great on DuckDuckGo.
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#23I had no idea how good ddg had gotten these days. Being from NZ, I thought I'd give it a good challenge. I entered !maori love, thinking it was impossible it would have a bang pattern for that, and it automatically brought me here https://maoridictionary.co.nz/search?idiom=&phrase=&proverb=....
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#24This is still very slow growth, 30M is still less than 1% of the amount of searches Google gets in a day.
If you add in the searches you don't see, i.e. those little titbits of travel and other information Google decides to search for you without you even asking, then the DDG search volume is really small.
Has anyone here tried 'Ecosia', the save-the-planet search engine that gives you 'Bing!' results? They don't exactly advertise where their search results come from. I wonder how their share of the search engine pie compares to DDG given that 'Ecosia' do advertise whereas DDG don't.
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#25The average tech person has been switching away from Google products, and this filters down to their social networks, and then their networks, and so on. It's a big deal when the tech people decide to switch. For me, it was Chrome making me log-in to my account. Now I use Firefox, DDG, ublock, privacy badger, etc. I think society writ large will begin to take privacy more seriously in the coming years. Edit FYI: If y…
There's all kinds of awesome 'bangs'. I realized it's actually easier to use the variety of google/bing search engines from ddg.
google scholar: !gsc
google images: !gi
bing: !b
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#26I switched earlier this year. It takes some time to get used to it. I used to !g often. It doesn't feel as intuitive at knowing what you are looking like Google. Addresses and map integration is not that good either and does not come even close to Google. It is a good enough. I have their app on my phone as my search tool, which I miss Google maps more often.
!gm will push you back to google maps if you need it!
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#27I switched earlier this year. It takes some time to get used to it. I used to !g often. It doesn't feel as intuitive at knowing what you are looking like Google. Addresses and map integration is not that good either and does not come even close to Google. It is a good enough. I have their app on my phone as my search tool, which I miss Google maps more often.
Try using "!s", which sends you to Startpage, a search engine with Google search results but which promises privacy.
(I don't know much more about Startpage, and in many discussions about DDG I ask if anyone knows more, but no luck so far.)
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#28So is privacy at last becoming mainstream? I look forward to the end of people saying "nobody cares about privacy".
I think people in tech underestimate how much normal people care. Maybe it is because tech people mix with the sort of tech-crazed consumerist who is more likely than most to swallow the kool-aid and disregard privacy concerns.
In my personal life I have been surprised many times by how privacy conscious normal people are.
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#29The main reason I use DuckDuckGo is when I want to search for more controversial topics that Google decides to filter how they want. When I search on DuckDuckGo I know I'm not having that filter imposed on me.
What kinds of searches are you referring to? I would guess DDG has the same legal requirements as Google. And do they not also filter violent hate groups and similar things?
Re: Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo hits 30M daily searches, up 50% in a year
#30After everything that has happened in the last few weeks I've completely moved away from Google.
1. I retired my ~15 year old Gmail account and registered with Fastmail
2. I moved away from Chrome to Firefox on both my laptop and phone
3. I stopped using Chrome's password manager on iOS in favor of 1Password and Firefox Lockbox
4. I've mostly stopped using the Google search engine and now using DDG and Bing if I have to.
Part of what helped me transition away from Google to DDG was skinning DDG to look like Google[0]. The first few days were really tough and I kept finding myself going back to Google about 80% of the time. I thought that the search results were remarkably poorer. I considered that it might just be anxiety of not using Google affecting my view, so as an experiment I decided to theme DDG to look like Google... and it worked. I stopped going back to Google and suddenly the searches became better.
I still use the !g bang for about 20% of my searches, and there are things that Google does so much better that I use quite often (for example searching a store name and it brings up all the local ones with information on what time they close etc, or if you were to write "tengo dolor de estomago en ingles" it would bring up an interactive translation box and so on) but for general searches I've more or less completely moved away.
[0] https://userstyles.org/styles/153678/duckduckgooglymoogly