I wonder how many include the google !bang to go direct to google. I love DDG, and have it as the default search on all my devices and browsers, but more than 50% of the time I go directly to google with !g in the search, and another 20% i guess i start at DDG but then add in !g when i find the results inferior.
For many searches, google's results I find are better - a common issue I've found it DDG's results are just too general for quite specific searches - .e.g the top result is teh homepage of a brand when I search for something more specific like "brand something something" (sorry i can't come up with a great example right now).
I still use DDG as I can use the rest of the bang syntax to get to wikipedia et al, and for certain things the results (e.g. code/technical) are clearly superior to googles.
I hope DDG logs all the times I go to DDG, then add in !g, to get some great analytics on when I found the search results lacking!
I don't think it matters how often you do !g, you're still going through ddg, which suggests ddg has a better relationship with you than google.
In facilitating your use of google for your specific searches, which you apparently can determine the likelihood of beforehand, ddg gets more of your searches for everything else. This is definitely a win for you and ddg, perhaps even for google if it increases your dependence on queries in general.
Also, I don't think ddg is trying to replace google. From your numbers, ddg is getting ~ 30% of your queries without having to implement deep search.
ddg doesn't log ip addresses/track you, so they could only probabilistically identify cases where people think ddg would do better but then fall back to google, but it will likely get harder and more computationally intense as they grow.
If x% of searches go direct to google or another source, that is x% of the "1 million a day" where DDG doesn't have the opportunity to show me adverts, which is DDG's primary revenue source I assume. So the figure is relevant. But notwithstanding that I agree with your comment - DDG has won me over and has a strong relationship with me.
Re. tracking, it's not just searches that I do that go directly to google; it's the times I go to DDG, am unsatisfied with the results, then tack on "!g" to try it on google. This should provide valuable data on when a user deems results not good enough.
I've recently done a double-take on my love for Google. I want to love Duck Duck Go. I really do. I tell all my less tech-savy friends/relatives about it.
Personally, though, I can't live without deep search. I'd say about 99.9999% of my searches are in the "brand something something" category, and there's not much point in adding an extra step to every search.
Unfortunately for DDG, my less tech-savy friends have had a similar experience. Since they're never going to try (or comprehend) the !bangs, after two or three attempts at a deep search they inevitably say "Well this is nice, but Google gives me what I'm looking for exactly."
Me, I was on Scroogle until recently when it's availability started to really suffer. Now, it's all Goosh, all the time!
But higher level, !g roughly accounted for 1% of queries yesterday, which also includes all the cases where we ran out of results and people clicked on our Try google link.
Here's a real example that just occurred. A Search for "jquery select visited anchor" on DDG returns the jquery selectors docs first (okay match) and jquery.com match second (useless). A search on google.com, the first 2 results are SO answers that answer exactly my question.
My point isn't specifically you rank SO lower than it should imo (although i do think this is the case) - its in general, for me, you return roots of homepages or brands at hte top when the query is clearly looking for something very specific.
You're probably going to do a lot better automating data collection based on DDG/!g searches. I really don't know how you'd score for quality, but at least take this as an example of a search whose results were not satisfactory.
Might also be the sort of thing to look at with a specific focus group. I know that the trend is to use a naive audience, but you might want to specifically recruit self-selected power-users.
I'd also design such a study to blind the result sets. I know Microsoft raised a bit of a stir claiming that their search results in blind testing were better than Google's a fair bit of the time. Problem at least personally with those results are that the two things I care about in search are relevance, and credibility in protecting user interests.
Microsoft have a very poor track record in that latter. I don't Bing. Period.
I have an idea, how about you add a feature, opt-in where you track the searches I do, and then do again with an added !g, at which point, store those in a list where I can go back and add feedback to each one where I got improved google searches, Or the ability to leave up a DDG feedback window when I do those searches. If you make it easy for me to give you feedback, I'll give you limitless amounts of it.
I don't understand this mentality... At least by judging from your response, it would appear that Google offers superior service for you. Why not use it then?
Is the promise of no tracking/bubbling a big draw for you?
Totally off-topic, but why do some people write 'mm' when they mean (I presume) million? From the subject line I initially thought Duck Duck Go had passed 1 millimetre of searches per day.
M is the roman numeral for 1,000. So MM is meant as 1,000 x 1,000, which equals 1,000,000 (one million). OP should have used capital letters, as mm does indeed denote millimeters. Better yet, just use the more common M symbol to mean "million."
There isn't a way to write one million in Roman numerals on a standard keyboard (it would be M with a bar over it, or "M" 1,000 times). Instead the shortcut "thousand thousand" (MM) gets used.
You've probably gotten all your answers based on the other comments. MM or mm should (if at all) only be used within finance. There is enough confusion on units already, that this can't possibly contribute to the better.
A few arguments as to why this is such a lousy notation:
* m and M already exist in the International System of Units, which is used by pretty much everybody else (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Non-Metric_User.svg). 'm' is either milli (10^-3) or meters, depending on the context. And M is Mega, or the number in question: one million.
* If the reason is to use roman numerals. M, for mille, means 1000. However, MM would mean two thousand, the same way XXII is 22.
* "Million" isn't ambiguous, unlike "billion", which either means 10^9 or 10^12.
Awesome. Resist the temptation to create DuckDuckMail, DuckDuckPlus, DuckDuckMaps. Stick to what makes DDG great; a simple, private, universal search engine.
While I agree that DDG should keep it simple, two of the three Google examples you've given -- Gmail and Maps -- are products I rely heavily on, and am glad Google decided to branch out for those two products alone.
I would have listed other, more toxic and/or embarrassingly unsuccessful examples, like:
The dis-proportionality of contextual pay per click revenue has financed Google's excursions in to all of these other areas.
One has to wonder if Google had just stuck with search, the search product would be significantly better than it is today. Instead we've got Google trying to be everything to everyone, at the cost of the integrity of those search results.
96% of revenue in the most recent quarter came from Advertising. If Google hadn't pioneered contextually relevant advertising it would likely be bankrupt today (as no VC would front the money it costs to run and maintain the datacenters powering search today).
To be honest, if they are able to maintain those services without downgrading the search-experience, and remain true to their "no tracking, no bubbling"-ideology I would welcome such services.
Well done to Gabriel. I love the clean design and customisability of DDG and the privacy policy. However I wonder if he's figured out a way to monetise it without sacrificing user experience [1] to keep it viable into the future.
BOSS queries are $0.80 per thousand queries, so $0.0008 per search. A web search site that uses a premium sponsored link feed should be able to generate about $0.04 per query (50% share of the $0.09 per query that Google makes). Thus the revenue generated could be about 50 times the cost of the raw materials (the BOSS search results). BOSS is cheap in that regard. If you extrapolate to an entire year, DDG could be making about $15 million per year in revenue if they chose to show ads aggressively.
Couldn't they just scrape Yahoo? Yahoo is very lenient towards scrapers - you can survive with just 10 proxies cycling, I doubt they do any intelligent blocking like Google
Their entire business is already quite fragile. And I know people who scrape Yahoo close to 1 million queries a day. They really are that ignorant or indifferent.
I'm rooting for Blekko and DDG and pretty much anything that will uproot or disturb Google's stronghold.
For one, I miss the days when Google search felt fresh, magical, and honest. Search Plus Your World just irks me, because, as many have pointed out, it isn't providing relevant results and its shoving G+ down my throat.
As an aside, I'm interested to see which major search engine will partner with Tumblr. I'm not smart enough to figure out the details of the relationship, but I think have access to their stream of data could be pretty cool.
DDG and even Bing/Yahoo both need to index much more of the web if they want to be competitive. You just can't beat anyone in quality when you have fewer results to work with - it's just simple math. I hope DDG uses some of its investment money on solving this problem (as well as speed, but speed is secondary). The bang codes, privacy, etc are all great.
Then they are limited to what's in Bing's/Yahoo's index, and their index is vastly inferior to Google's... it's not even close. This is partially why Google has better results - they simply crawl more of the web (plus their algorithm too, of course).
Why can't DDG just cut their losses and invest in building their own index? It's much more worth it in the long run. All DDG is doing is adding cool, nice to have UI features on top of Bing/Yahoo, but what about the core?
DDG's main schtick is that they don't track users. It would be nearly impossible to match Google or Bing's ranking relevance without using signals derived from logged user traffic. Their core principles essentially ensure they won't ever be a serious competitor to the leading search engines, unless a lot of people decide that they're willing to sacrifice a lot of relevance in their search results in exchange for stricter privacy.
I'm quite sure they used to use google in the past
> Why can't DDG just cut their losses and invest in building their own index?
That's far from trivial task.. Scraping and using other peoples results is easy, building and scaling a huge database like search index is one of the hardest problems you can find.
Ok that's fair. But in that case, I don't understand what compelling way DDG is differentiating themselves from other search engines besides a few cool, nice, thin value features.
Because right now there are only 2 companies in the world with sufficient technical chops to build a competent end-to-end modern search engine. It's a HARD problem. No startup can do it.
Well for one, results come from far more sources than /just/ bing and yahoo, and they are also put through a custom algorithm. Then there is the 0-click info, official sites, etc. As for building an index, I'm not sure what the plans are there, however there has been some discussion of a distributed spider. Obviously, spidering would mean a LOT of resources directed away from search (don't forget the limited human resources too).
More results doesn't always give better results. Generally, they do, but depending on the problem it's often very marginal.
The actual ranking algorithm is more important, especially (I suspect) pre-processing. Google's main advantage (I'd guess) is its expertise in algorithms and processing.
I always liked the site but to be honest after using it as my default search engine briefly in chromium, i found it didn't quite compare to google in terms of:
1. Performance. There's a small but significant gap between the two services in terms of the speed in which they serve redirects and search results.
2. Features. Although a lack of features like mail, maps etc. is, I suppose, part of ddg's philosophy, I feel like it's merely inconvenient compared to google where all it's services are immediately available with a click. Also, ddg doesn't save any web history which can actually be very useful for people using more than one computer.
It's not that I dislike ddg and what it does. It fills a nice gap in the market and I like it's principles of privacy. But for now, performance trumps freedom I guess :p
Agreed on performance. I guess it's a matter of having servers all over the place like Google.
As for having mail, maps, etc. I prefer they don't. That'd basically mean tracking. Just set up your browser to have it accessible if it's a big deal for you. Can be done in several ways.
in hindsight this comment seems a little harsh. It's not fair at all to compare the two in terms of performance when google is a huge multinational with servers all over the world and ddg only has a few (I imagine)
This is great news. I remember a previous post where the HN community suggested minor improvements on the placement of sponsored links, and DDG was quick to suggest a fix was in the works. The partnership done with Linux Mint means that they have been my default search engine ( + thousands of others) for about 3 months now. There isn't a feeling of loss felt by using their service, except on a few, rare occasions.
... I just hope they stay true to their goals
it seems silly to compete on crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam, real privacy and a better overall search experience.http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...
Congratulations to DDG Team, I switch to DDG around a month back and have loved it ever since. !yt, !so..http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html are really good when you want the search to get out of the way.
My favourite part about using DDG is the !bang operators. Now I can search Wikipedia, Amazon, Google, etc. from the same "command line" (i.e. my Firefox search box). Awesome.
http://screencast.com/t/yZIkmNkMV8wp
^ Fresh Opera install. Opera ships with DDG but not as the default. Frankly I would guess that the impact this has is insignificant: Opera has a small user base in the first place, and ddg is just one of several options in a list. How many people will, without prompting, explore what this new search is in their Opera, and understand the benefit of using it? At first blush (without knowledge of the privacy protections, bang syntax etc.) DDG is just a cleaner, slower, unfamiliar google with worse results. (I say this as someone with DDG as his default on all browsers.)
Guess my use of it is in the stat. :) I'm using may be 50% DDG and 50% Google. Still training my muscle memory on the hot key.
DDG's privacy policy is superb. Its search result is pretty good with non of the bloats. I still remember how Google Preview was infuriatingly distracting that I had to install add-on to get rid of it completely.
For many searches, google's results I find are better - a common issue I've found it DDG's results are just too general for quite specific searches - .e.g the top result is teh homepage of a brand when I search for something more specific like "brand something something" (sorry i can't come up with a great example right now).
I still use DDG as I can use the rest of the bang syntax to get to wikipedia et al, and for certain things the results (e.g. code/technical) are clearly superior to googles.
I hope DDG logs all the times I go to DDG, then add in !g, to get some great analytics on when I found the search results lacking!