I have to admit I was skeptical about DDG chances but hard work and being in right place at the right time with privacy has given it the success it deserves.
We've been reading epi0Bauqu's posts about DDG here for... what is it now? Over 3 years? At first it seemed like a wonderfully quixotic project - a new, home-grown search engine? Yeah right!
But then a year passed, then another, and traffic was up, and then it was up some more, and it seemed like he would never give up... at some point it stopped looking quixotic, and started to be a joy to watch. Will love to see what the future will bring.
Traffic is easy. Profit is harder - especially if you make it clear from the outset that you're anti-advertising (See Reddit).
Whilst the growth is fun to watch, it's still only 37 direct queries a second, which is nothing.
Also, I know it's been mentioned a million times before, but the name is an artificial ceiling to growth. A large % of people have no clue what duck duck goose is. A large % of people see the name as amateur, childish and stupid.
You are right about that...but years ago I had a service which shall remain nameless that got 10 million hits a month just by removing the tracking links on Google search results.
I didnt make a dime, but I did get calls from spooky people out of the blue who wouldnt identify themselves asking questions.
I admire anyone who pursues this goal, and yet I will never go there again.
I didn't realise they had done that to ehow. I wonder if they could kill some of the region specific crap. If you search for a company here in Auckland you get these junk sites (localist, hot frog, finda) that have out of data that's been scraped an age ago and for some reason ranks high. This would probably be a deciding factor in browser choice for me.
I didn't either. Disclaimer: I work for Demand Media on another property (Pluck), and have only been here about 10 months. I do know a few people on the various teams that do work with eHow and the titling algorithms, though.
Looks like that was in early 2011, before Panda came and nearly wiped eHow out, and over a year before I started. After that, they made a concerted effort to fix their algorithms and focus on providing good, non-automated content. Are they still considered a content farm to be avoided these days?
I think eHow managed to build up a certain reservoir of whatever the opposite of brand loyalty is among techies, so there's some lingering effect. These days I personally don't think eHow is uniquely bad. I don't think it on average has particularly great content (there are a handful of very good entries, but they're unusual), but it's not spam, or at least not more spammy than seems to be the norm in large-scale commercial media properties. A lot of it is just run-of-the-mill mediocre content on popular keywords, vaguely like About.com or the array of recipe sites, or (with some tilt towards current events) the kind of stuff published by Gawker, HuffPo, Cracked, etc.
On the plus side, I think they're going to use my team's Hackathon project on eHow to replace all the irrelevant remnant ads with relevant, related ones, and clean it up a bit.
I've found that for utterly and moronically basic stuff that I've forgotten about, eHow does an okay job. Of course, I can't speak for anything remotely complicated.
I also think that their name is part of the reason for their success. It's different from 'google' or 'bing' or 'yahoo' and it yet it is specific for what it does and I think lends people a partial understanding as to what the benefits are, right out of the box.
I've been getting the DDG newsletters since day 1, but I can't seem to fully adapt to duck duck go. I guess I just am addicted to using google.
=EDIT=
For those commenting that they aren't familiar with the name, its interesting that you still understand its a search engine. Thus for you, understanding the context of the name is irrelevant. But for those not familiar with search engines, but do know duck duck goose, I think its pretty logical to explain 'duck duck go' as a search engine.
I've never heard of this game. I thought that the name hints to the duck test: "if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_test
I.e. that Duck Duck Go is what it looks it is - it's a search engine. And not some tool which secretly harvests data of its users for its own benefit.
> I.e. that Duck Duck Go is what it looks it is - it's a search engine. And not some tool which secretly harvests data of its users for its own benefit.
Well, from this point on both are now true. You're assumption is fantastic. (assuming DDG actually STAYS that way!
I am American, and I have no idea of what Duck Duck Go means. Possibly an inside joke? I personally think the name is a limiting factor, and they would be better off with something else (DDG?).
"Duck Duck Goose" is a children's game, in which one player touches the others, each in turn, saying "duck" each time, (duck, duck, duck.... ) then saying "goose!" upon tagging someone "it". So that selection process might reflect looking at search engine results and selecting the right one.
I also think there's a double entendre here, in that to "duck" (i.e. to hunch down for cover) relates to privacy. Duck (privacy invasion), duck (more tracking attempts), then go (to your intended destination).
So: pick from a few choices till you find the goose (that laid the golden egg -- but I digress), then go. And keep your head down while you're doing it. I love it.
Final note: an acquaintance of mine recently worked at Google as a project manager. I first learned about DDG from him about 18 months ago. I got the strong impression, even then, that he (and others at Google) were concerned that DDG might take off.
I also like the red...not because I think it's beautiful (it's not imo but that's subjective) but because it's very distinct and associateable with search
Wow, that's good to see perl 'still' being used by someone that big. I didn't believe you to begin with but to quote the wikipedia article:
"The search engine is written in Perl and runs on nginx, FreeBSD and Linux."
Booking.com is a large online travel agency which is pretty popular in Europe. From a recent job description:
Due to our continuing growth we are in search of Perl Developers for our headquarters in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We use Perl, Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, Memcache, JavaScript, Git, Linux & more. We do agile software development based on scrum.
I guess we can call that the 90's heritage of Booking.com. Naturally we can't use the same explanation for DDG, which launched less than half a decade ago.
But it also gives very good results for common search tasks. Compared it myself to few other not so known search engines and it gives even better results than Google since it doesn't seem to favor corporate web pages but rather relevant results.
Google became too big and too greedy and top of it all caved into the mass surveillance scheme, behind our backs. Why use a search engine and products endorsed by hypocrites. At least yahoo did some minor fight although they are not exactly better either, but that fight did give many of us a warning about what is going on behind the curtains.
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 hypothetical. I'm a big fan of both Gabriel and DDG, and I'm not suggesting he would ever do these.
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.
Fortunately any regulatory regime would be an absolute nightmare so I am not worried about search neutrality ever being a big thing. How do you distinguish between relevant search results and a lack of search neutrality?
First, I am sure your comment about language selection was personal. Facebook in large part stands on PHP; does that mean PHP is better than perl?
Second, I am not sure about their future. It looks like its a temporary spark after all the omg-goverment-tracks-my-searches paranoia.
The fact is, if the large organisations such as Google or Microsoft could not admit on the record to participation in PRISM, what makes you think Duck will? Further, if PRISM is real and if large organisations such as Google or Microsoft could not say "no", what makes you think Duck will have an option for a different fate? Lastly, if there is no trucking by gov of your searches, then there is not much different in using Google versus Duck for someone who has been using Google for years and just temporarily switched to Duck.
Their motto is they don't track your history at all, so even if the government asked for information or it became part of prism they would have nothing to give.
Under which law. Current data retention laws are you have to retain what you say you retain. So if your stated policy is 90 days but you only keep 30, you are not compliant. But if you keep 0 and state you keep 0 days you are compliant. Obviously, there are different rules for finance, govt, and medical industries.
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't describe Googles as a perfect search at any stretch. The spammy sites that have scraped a terrible version of some old data that is vaguely related to my search terms a a constant irritation, and scrolling past several adverts its very annoying. NSA and creepy tracking aside.
Even 2 of my friends who don't even know the difference between Chrome and Internet Explorer recently talked about "this new search engine, something with duck...".
Is there any reason to switch if you don't really care about privacy? For me DDG is just a skin on top of the Bing search index with a silly name. Why would I use it?
It is true that ddg gets some content from bing, but also from yandex, wolframalpha, and yahoo. Also, ddg does some indexing themselves. Saying that they are "just a skin for bing" doesn't really describe what they are
I kind of like the !bang syntax for searches. Its easier than curating a big list of specific search engines (stackoverflow, wikipedia, amazon, google, ...) yourself.
They got a huge boost out of the whole NSA fallout, which they consequently used to great effect for marketing. Good for them! I still hate the name, though.
To each his own, but I think the name is endearing and cute.
I've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine ever since the NSA fallout came, and the results are surprisingly usable for most common tasks. In some cases they feel better than Google because I'm seeing some useful sites that Google doesn't ordinarily show.
The only area where DuckDuckGo searches have been lacking for me is in finding useful technical articles and code results. Sometimes when I have to search for a complicated error message or research some programming problem to see how other people have approached it DDG will not work for me and I have to resort to Google or directly search Stackoverflow or something.
But it's already usable for the average person IMO.
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.
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.
Sorry should have been more clear. I run the site that provides ddg with the code results (usually) so a search like "php mysql_query example" will trigger my API. I am always interested to find people using this and seeing if the result was OK for them.
For privacy, I'd love to switch to DDG. I try them out almost every time I read about them. But I always end up switching back to GOOG because I just can't find what I want.
Here's how today's switch went:
1. Install DDG chrome extension
2. Set DDG as default search provider
3. Search "duck duck go bang feature" (for a refresher)
Granted you probably don't have to worry about this on Google but if you'd typed the name as one word (which it always is, AFAIK) you would have gotten the proper results.
You can consider that a shortcoming given how specific the query was. However, once you realize its behavior it isn't that difficult to find what you want– in some cases, it's actually very helpful.
I just switched my region to "No Region" and you're right, the top result is https://duckduckgo.com/newbang. Switching back to Japan gives the proper result.
Good. Google monopoly is bad for everyone except their shareholders.
I'd love the search market to be split into 3-4 entities with similiar market share - not one getting 80-90% of the cake. Google extracts way too much value out of web traffic, killing the small business - and this phenomenon increases quarter by quarter in its intensity.
I'm not sure I agree completely. There are some advantages. One being that if you are interested in advertising, you can work with optimizing 1 campaign instead of 4.
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.
Same here. I used DDG a couple of years ago, for about 2 months. I also ended up going back to Google for at least 30% of my queries. As a result of the reduction in productivity, I decided to switch back to Google. Besides the anonymity there are a couple of features I like, but content wise there is no match to Google at the moment. One thing I like is the bang feature (!stackoverflow hello world), but realize that Chromium offers something more convenient built-in, which I also rarely use in practice.
Still waiting for something that brings the best of both worlds.
You can always use Startpage to use Google https://startpage.com/. I use both Startpage and DDG frequently. Sometimes the results of one are what I want and sometimes the other.
The whole idea of there being just one useful search engine doesn't make sense to me. I only wish these companies would do more to differentiate themselves and that there were more options.
My take: In 2 months of using DDG I've only had to go back to Google twice, and there were quite a few queries where it was even better than Google (mainly because of the meta information it showed at the top https://duckduckgo.com/?q=4+largest+countries+in+the+Caribbe... surprised me)
I'm really glad that DDG has been able to capitalize on the NSA fallout. I remember checking the site out awhile ago but defaulted to expecting failure (hey, I'm not a VC).
The only real reason I haven't switched is that I'm VERY wired into the Google ecosystem. I use Google Apps heavily and have a Nexus phone. Search results on DDG aren't always great but that was never really a problem for me.
It surprised me to see how DDG actually succeeded in getting noticed by mainstream media and millions of users despite operating on a very small footprint in an extremely difficult market dominated by Google, arguably by making a few right business / ethic choices. That may be encouraging for people who'd like to keep developing for the web, but found too many interesting areas already well-covered by industry behemoths (with weaknesses?).
ixquick is its own thing, but startpage mostly gets its content from google. If you want a secure way to search (mostly) google, use startpage. I miss scroogle...
This increase in traffic are not being seen in the unique visitor counts measured by Compete (https://siteanalytics.compete.com/duckduckgo.com/). It appears as if a loyal core of duckduckgo users are switching to it entirely. Alternatively, duckduckgo users are not tracked by Compete, which is entire possible since I believe Compete gets their data from browser extensions that don't respect privacy. Note, Compete data is old, and wouldn't reflect this surge.
I soft-switched a month or two ago and in the beginning was adding !g to pretty much every query out of habit. Over the last week however I decided to poke around more (checking out the other ! tags, understanding what sorts of special queries would get answers) and have only asked for Google results once since to compare with DDG. Google's presentation is still much better (i.e. if I type in Yankees on Google I get a fully styled box score and schedule... with DDG I get some Wikipedia suggestions and a small blurb from MLB/ESPN news underneath.) but for web results I haven't been too disappointed. It's far less frustrating than I remember it being for regular use, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if recent events have prompted more casual users to commit to it.
Edit: For a good example of its biases, search "hacker news" on ddg, bing, then google.
Interesting. DuckDuckGo shows news.ycombinator.com as the featured site, while Google does not show this exact link at all on the first site, neither via g! nor s!. Only the HN jobs site is in the top ten search results. Bing has it correctly again.
Judging by my own experience and some of my colleagues, this seems to be the case.
I switched to DDG about a week before the whole NSA thing. At first it was awkward, queries are slower than google (sometimes the results are worse), but after a while I stopped noticing it.
I don't mind waiting a second more if it means not being tracked, and most of the time my queries are simple and the results are on par with other search engines.
*edit changed <<worst>> to <<worse>> the results aren't that bad...
That graph only goes to May. The increase happened two months later. For the date range it shows, their estimates match up with the usage graph on DDG almost perfectly.
I've finally managed to make the switch to DDG and this time it seems to stick. Every time I've tried before, I've quickly gone back to google, not finding the results good enough.
Either the results have improved since then, or I'm more conscious about my provacy and thus avoiding using and depending on Google products all over the line.
The last 2 months I've completely dropped at least 4 Google products, and I can see the list getting longer.
Thanks to the DDG-team for being one of the actors out there who respect my privacy!
DDG is headed in the right direction. But it still isn't quite ready for me to use it daily. I start typing a query in and have to wait a minute wondering why the suggestions aren't showing up. I am completely used to how Google works.
A critical feature I would like to see are real-time search results that Google added a few years ago. Autocomplete suggestions are also critical.
I love the ducky. From the idea of privacy to the name and the cutest logo. Yes, the quality of the search is not as finely bubbled as Google's, but it's actually a feature.
I'm very glad that Gabriel was brave enough to start a new search engine and stuck to the project, which really paid off. We have a viable, non-tracking alternative to Google now.
I really like duck duck go. I just wish they would register ddg.cm so I don't have to type out the whole url. I would register it myself and forward it if it wasn't for the fact that cm registrations cost nearly 100 dollars.
If you bookmark any website's search results page, you can add a keyword and edit the bookmarked URL to include a printf-style %s placeholder. When you enter the keyword plus some string, Firefox opens the bookmarked URL, substituting your string for %s.
I've moved to using it as my default search provider. I'm using it well over half the time and if the results aren't great I add !g to the end to get google's results.
I personally think the 7 day average gives a better picture than the 28 day for the usage trends. 1 day has too much noise with the day of the week variations. In th 7 day average you can see a decrease after the last spike.
The http://dontbubble.us/ site did it for me -- in a contest to see who filters the most accurate results for my brain between my brain and their artificial intelligence...I will always win.
I switched to DDG for a week. I found the results very good considering they don't track at all and can't improve ambiguous terms. I found the performance a bit disappointing however and the lack of Chrome instant suggestions a minor annoyance.
I am doing 90% of my searches in DDG. And its just a matter of time to also do the remaining 10%.
Meanwhile, if they add the something like google apps, it will be awesome. Specially a free email service.
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.
Do people that switch really think that their privacy is better off? I though the NSA was logging everything that travels the network at some large backbones?
Source? Storage is pretty cheap, but storing everything? That's a lot of data. (You'd have to store a copy of that netflix movie every time it's played back)
And if that then becomes the new average for DDG, is it still misleading? According to the chart, it has a great chance of maintaining its post-Bloomberg new levels.
(and it's written in perl of all things)
ps. bonus points for deleting eHow from results