
DuckDuckGo Traffic - patrickbolle
https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
======
ravenstine
The results are good enough at that I use it exclusively now.

In case y'all didn't know, DDG does some neat things like this:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=beautify+json&t=h_&ia=answer](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=beautify+json&t=h_&ia=answer)

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qr+hello+hn&atb=v123-2__&ia=answer](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qr+hello+hn&atb=v123-2__&ia=answer)

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=url+unescape+Hello%2520HN&atb=v123...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=url+unescape+Hello%2520HN&atb=v123-2__&ia=answer)

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=crontab+0+0+*+*+*+%2Fbin%2Fsh&atb=...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=crontab+0+0+*+*+*+%2Fbin%2Fsh&atb=v123-2__&ia=answer)

~~~
clubm8
They can also do cool stuff like currency conversion:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=10+cad+in+usd&atb=v123-2__&ia=curr...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=10+cad+in+usd&atb=v123-2__&ia=currency)

And generate passphrases:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=7+word+passphrase&atb=v123-2__&ia=...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=7+word+passphrase&atb=v123-2__&ia=answer)

My killer app is the bang commands:
[https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

!hn for hacker news !a for amazon !w for wikipedia !imdb for imdb !reddit for
reddit !wa is the best for calculations and other weird stuff (ex: type in a
date and find out what day of the week it was)

~~~
h1d
When it comes to password, you're better off using some offline tool.

~~~
orf
Why? Because some high powered adversary is spying and decrypting all your
internet traffic to find a passphrase you may or may not use in its entirety?

~~~
h1d
DDG should be fine to be trusted but you don't know what kind of code produced
it.

You need to worry about where the produced password is stored, how random it
is and you can't prove any of it.

Generally, you can't just decrypt your traffic... there are other attack
vectors.

~~~
moollaza
Our instant answers are open source. You can see the Perl used for the
passphrase Goodie here: [https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-
goodies/blob/mas...](https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-
goodies/blob/master/lib/DDG/Goodie/Passphrase.pm)

We’re not storing these generated phrases anywhere.

------
mattlondon
I have recently switched to Firefox, and have been using DDG now for some time
both on desktop and mobile.

In my experience Firefox + DDG _is_ a viable alternative to Chrome + Google
Search.

Occasionally I still need to go for google, but for about 98% of the time I'd
say DDG is a no-op drop-in replacement for Google. I highly recommend this
browser & search engine combo - DDG is great now, and Firefox is now decent
again after a while in the wilderness.

Firefox also has some neat extensions like Google Container [1] that sandboxes
all google cookies so you can still login to Gmail etc, but the cookies are
not available for tracking elsewhere (e.g. analytics). I've recommended this
add-on a lot recently - I've got no connection to it, just a satisfied user.

1 - [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-
contai...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-container/)

~~~
robertAngst
I have a very serious question about privacy that I dont want to be judged
for.

Should I switch if I do nothing wrong? I stopped downloading illegal videos
and my porn is tame.

What bad things can google do to me if I'm a user that doesnt care about
privacy for myself?

~~~
KAMSPioneer
I think there are a ton of very well-spoken arguments for why everyone, yes
even those who "do nothing wrong," should care about privacy, and I would
encourage you to look at those. Mostly because the people who publicly speak
about this are much more eloquent than I, and have thought much more on the
topic.

That said, I think it boils down to this: we all want privacy, but digital
privacy is a hard problem because we are not "wired" to understand it. Humans
are not good at interacting with systems with perfect memory, huge
computational power, and extremely insightful statistical modeling
capabilities.

This affects us differently than interacting with a person. Now, a machine can
categorize you automatically based on political beliefs, religious beliefs,
friend networks, conversational style, etc. This can be used to target you for
(arguably unethical) influence via surgically targeted propaganda, or to
retroactively mark you as a dissident in a tyrannical regime based on a
comment you made off-hand years before the regime took power.

Left unchecked, these invasive tracking systems could be used for a myriad of
unethical purposes. And even if you "do nothing wrong," it's important to
remember that in most legal systems, it's very difficult to lead a normal life
and never break _any_ laws. Add to that the very, very long records these
systems are capable of keeping on you, and I think it's clear why many people,
myself included, wish to minimize our presence on platforms such as Google.

~~~
brennebeck
I think, especially with regards to your opening paragraph, that some
references would’ve been great here. Anything in particular you could point
to?

------
Alir3z4
I've been using DuckDuckGo for more than a year now and barely use other
search engines. It's the default on all the devices that I use.

I am so happy to be a user and be part of their growth as well.

The only thing that could improve it would be searches in other languages, I
still don't get a good result when I search in other languages such as
Russian, Persian, Arabic, etc..

Thank you DuckDuckGo for the great service <3

~~~
wool_gather
Same, very happy using DDG. I hope they're becoming profitable.

The one thing that I have to go back to Google for is when I want to search
just one specific site (usually Stack Overflow, I guess). Google has the
`site:example.com` feature. I don't think that's possible with DDG.

EDIT: Apparently it does work! Thanks, I'm pretty sure it didn't when I
started using DDG. Maybe I'm just an idiot.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
!so searches stack overflow, !im images, !g google, !w wikipedia etc. Take a
look at bangs: [https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)
there's thousands of them.

~~~
froogie
For me, bangs are the actual killer feature. Because when I set DDG as my
default search engine in my browser, I get to use bangs at the address bar.

So for example rather than having to use Wikipedia's or Stack Overflow's
search bar to find something, it's just Ctrl+t and "!w <term>" or "!gi
<term>".

On Windows this is quite 50-50 -- you're likely holding the mouse anyway. On
Unix machines with more keyboard-oriented UI, with say a tiling WM, things
like bangs at browser address bar are a godsent. Of course it is nice on
mobile too -- direct queries rather than hoppping around using clumsy
touchscreen.

There are likely browser extensions for this though, but none of them set DDG
as their default search engine -- so just doing that manually also gives you
the bangs so in my book DDG wins here ;)

~~~
dash2
Firefox lets you set up search keywords, which to match the same thing. They
used to be hidden away, but more recently they’ve got promoted a bit and are
quite easy to set up.

~~~
tordanik
Firefox search keywords are awesome! They can be much shorter than bangs
because there's no need to avoid name conflicts with thousands of sites you
aren't using. Plus, no exclamation mark, and you can use them for sites at
work which aren't publicly visible.

------
gjm11
So, I set Firefox to use DDG rather than Google as its default search engine a
little while ago. And, reading this discussion, I realised that I'd like to
see a complete list of "bang" searches DDG knows how to do.

Putting "duckduckgo bang" into DDG itself produces results that are ... not
helpful. At any rate, nothing on the first page looks like it has any chance
of answering the question.

But "!g duckduckgo bang" gives me
[https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang) as the first hit
(this is a high-level description of the bang feature), followed by
[https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html](https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html)
(which has the actual complete list right there), followed by someone's list
of the 25 allegedly-most-useful DDG bangs. Most of the rest of the first-page
hits are also informative -- they're things like Reddit and HN discussions of
the bang features.

I think this is actually the clearest case I've seen since switching to DDG
where Google had demonstrably more useful results. Which is kinda ironic.

~~~
Const-me
I've asked that query. DDG showed a gray panel at the very top of the resut
page, saying "Search thousands of sites directly from DuckDuckGo. Learn more
about !bangs (or submit a new one!)"

~~~
gjm11
Huh. It's there for me too, now I actually look. I guess I've learned to
ignore banner-shaped things at the top of web pages.

[EDITED to add:] Actually, I seem to get it for "duckduckgo bangs" and for
"bang duckduckgo" but not for "duckduckgo bang". But I'm not sure it's
consistent from one search to the next. Anyway, I think the reason I didn't
see it before is that it wasn't there, not that I'm banner-blind.

~~~
tomsmeding
I actually do get it for "duckduckgo bang". Maybe they're hotfixing it, or
maybe some self-learning algorithm decided that this was close enough to
"duckduckgo bangs"? Shooting in the dark here.

------
azatris
I wish this had better branding. You can't say "just DuckDuckGo it". It has to
have a single, or at most a double-syllable name that is easy to remember.
Like Google or Bing.

But maybe it's part of some sort of strategy where in the early years the
branding is weird in order to gain notoriety, and then change it when the
timing is right.

I think right now this is probably slowing growth. I wonder how much would
duck.com cost.

~~~
gingericha
“Just duck it“?

~~~
wes-k
"let me just duck that for you"

I'm in!

~~~
n0tme
\- Can you duck it for me? \- Go duck yourself!

------
danShumway
A really underrated feature of DuckDuckGo is the number/quality of search
cards[0]. A lot of Google's search cards just kind of pull from whatever the
top result is -- but DuckDuckGo's all have specific algorithms which makes
them more predictable.

With Google, I have to take an extra second to think about _why_ they're
showing an answer at the top. But if DuckDuckGo inlines an answer from
StackOverflow, I know what the algorithm is --> Get top-rated StackOverflow
result, get highest rated answer, inline the first X paragraphs, give a button
to expand.

I still occasionally use !g for some searches if I strike out finding answers
on DuckDuckGo, but I'm at the point where I generally prefer DuckDuckGo's
answers. It's really tough to explain what's different about them, it feels
like DuckDuckGo has a different "style" of search results or something. Even
when I'm using Google, I usually have DuckDuckGo open next to it, because
Google and DuckDuckGo feel like they cover different ground.

It's just that by default, the ground that DuckDuckGo is covering feels more
relevant for just very quickly getting information and then getting out
(especially with the better search cards).

[0]:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+char+codes&t=canonical&...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+char+codes&t=canonical&ia=answer&iax=answer)

~~~
londons_explore
> I know what the algorithm is --> Get top-rated StackOverflow result, get
> highest rated answer, inline the first X paragraphs, give a button to
> expand.

Google couldn't do that due to past court decisions about the maximum they can
show being 'snippet length' without getting further into disputed copyright
territory.

I expect they're working on AI tech which can read the whole web and directly
answer your questions rather than having to use an extract of a webpage at
all.

~~~
danShumway
> I expect they're working on AI tech

But that's exactly the problem. Google already will try to auto-answer some
questions that you ask. But the way they do it is completely opaque.

So I have no idea a) when they'll suggest an answer, and b) why they'll
suggest an answer.

When I see an answer on DuckDuckGo, it's consistent. I immediately know how
much trust to put into it. I don't have to look for the source and try to
figure out where it sits on that scale. What's even better is that over time
with DuckDuckGo, I get better at phrasing queries in a way that I know an
instant answer will pop up. With Google, because they probably already use a
bunch of weird AI in the background, I have never been able to predict whether
or not a query will pop up a card, so I can't actually rely on getting an
answer quickly in advance.

These are tiny things that shave time off of my searches. I often use
DuckDuckGo's StackOverflow cards as language references -- to be able to say,
"hey, jog my memory with a really quick example of this syntax."[0][1] I want
to know details like the source of that answer before I search it.

AI tech will _never_ be as good as having a consistent algorithm for this --
because even if it got to be as good as a person going out and looking up the
answers for me, a person is never going to be as good as a consistent
algorithm. This is what people don't understand about natural language
interpretation -- they think that there's some theoretical end-point where a
computer will be as good at interpreting commands as a human is. But they
forget that giving a human commands is _already_ slower and less reliable than
giving a computer commands. Having a digital assistant be ridged and
predictable is a strength, not a weakness.

[0]:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=js+send+a+network+request&t=canoni...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=js+send+a+network+request&t=canonical&ia=qa)

[1]:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stackoverflow+linux+find+filename&...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stackoverflow+linux+find+filename&t=canonical&ia=qa&iax=qa)

------
amelius
DDG, if you're reading this:

I _want_ to make the switch.

But typing "!g" when a search does not return what I want is too clumsy. It
requires 7 touch-events on mobile (including focus and space).

Please make that simpler, and I _will_ switch.

(My suggestion would be to have a "!g" button at the bottom of the search
results. Perhaps make it optional, depending on user-settings; I don't mind a
cookie for just that.)

~~~
cardamomo
Why make it Google-specific? What if DDG could suggest from a range of other
search engines that might give you better results based on the nature of your
query?

~~~
jononor
Having buttons for "try this search on [Google] [Yandex]" could be useful data
to collect for improving the search results.

~~~
AsyncAwait
Yes, however Google's results would be different for everyone, based on what
Google knows about you.

------
TheCoreh
I've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for almost a year now.
I still need to resort to !g for about 1/3 of my queries, which is less than
it used to be, so the quality is definitely improving.

One weird thing that I noticed is that every so often when I'm in a Google
SERP (e.g. in a friend's phone) and I'm not fully satisfied with the results,
I add in !g, only to realize that makes no sense. So I wonder if there's a
subset of queries that DDG produces better results for, or if Google's search
quality is declining.

If anyone from DDG is reading this: Please add the ability to (voluntarily)
personalize search results via a cookie, just like you do for the interface
theme. Something like "Programming Language: JavaScript". That way ambiguous
queries (e.g "array reverse") can be associated with the specific context
without having to type it every time (e.g. "array reverse js")

~~~
utopcell
DDG cannot provide personalized results, because the service they are using to
get results (from Bing) does not provide that feature.

~~~
TheCoreh
That's not necessarily true. They could use a classifier to figure out the
subject of the query (e.g. programming, cooking, travel) and then modify the
query sent to Bing or whatever backend they use. Bonus points if they actually
expose this on the UI, in a way that allows you to remove the personalization

"array reverse [JavaScript x]"

"camping sites [Near Lake Tahoe x]"

~~~
utopcell
That's not personalization, that's query classification. Of course Bing
already does this.

What is the personal, private information they could be monitoring for, that
would allow them to rewrite better than Bing ?

~~~
TheCoreh
They wouldn't be monitoring. You'd explicitly tell them what personalizations
you want, and that would be stored in your machine via a cookie that you can
delete at will (just like the color scheme/font)

It could either be a power user setting hidden away (like color scheme
currently is), or it could be exposed on the SERP interface via a prompt: "Set
JavaScript as your default programming language?" "Set vegan as your default
diet?" etc

------
mattmanser
I use DDG on my phone, still Google on my desktop.

While there are a lot of things to like about DDG, the searches are still
pretty rubbish.

What's worst about DDG is that it is absolutely useless at location searches.

The one that really bugs me is "Nottingham Weather". Location set to UK, yet
it returns the weather for White March, MD

Nottingham, population 700,000, but somehow a road in White Marsh, MD,
America, population 9,513, is the result it shows.

If I'm searching a venue, pub, club, etc. with United Kingdom set, it usually
returns US bars or venues with the same name.

Anything technical Google is also much better at filtering the dross and
returning something meaningful, though that might be because it's learnt the
programming languages, etc. I use.

~~~
shaklee3
The UK location came up first for me. Have you tried it recently?

~~~
mattmanser
Yes, do you have quick answers turned off?

~~~
shaklee3
I was just using the default mode. I've only used ddg once, so I should have
no settings.

------
nebulous1
Alright, I'm going to give it another go. Tried a few years back and ended up
!g to the end of almost every search

I liked all the other functionality a lot, but the results themselves just
didn't work for me.

~~~
gary__
Why does google allow !g? They are competitors after all?

Edit, ok, I see it redirects the user to Google.com

~~~
windexh8er
This isn't really any different than StartPage. What I find a good search-flow
is that instead of doing a !g [search] I just use !sp [search], instead. That
way you don't land on Google for the search at all but you get the entire list
of results and StartPage has a better stance on privacy.

Regarding DDG on general, I've been using it exclusively as my first search
provider and it has ramped in quality searches at a nice clip. I find myself
bouncing through to the above search-flow less and less over time and I'm now
in the process of deGoogling other things.

Keep donating to those privacy focused services where you can! DDG is a prime
example of showing how these services can exist without an agenda, other than
customer oriented features.

~~~
Vinnl
> Keep donating to those privacy focused services where you can!

As good a moment as any to publicly express gratitude to the donations DDG has
provide to us (Terms of Service; Didn't Read) and several other privacy-
focused projects, which has been of great help.

------
maxwell
I changed my default from Google Search to DDG in February. Surprised by how
little I’ve noticed the change, after nearly 20 years using Google.

It feels more like the old Google that wasn’t stuffed with ads, and I find it
superior for programming queries (aside from Angular 2+ docs).

I still type in google.com and perform queries there a few times a week. I
also turn to Google Images for copyleft photos, as DDG doesn’t seem to support
filtering by license yet.

------
mrcnkoba
I'm really amazed by the adoption of DDG by HN crowd. It's totally unusable
for me. I can barely find stuff and I have to resort to google in 95% of
cases. Do I have to relearn how to goo.. scratch that, duck duck go stuff?

~~~
stinos
_Do I have to relearn how to goo.._

Sort of, yes. See other comments around here as well. It's like Google without
the backend which knows your habits and bubble and tries to be smart (and
succeeds, often) and figures out what you want to search for despite you being
a bit vague. DDG doesn't do that so, like in the old days, you have to be
specific. Like if you talk to a person and ask a question: you also don't ask
'pasta?'. You ask 'where can I buy pasta' for instance.

~~~
sonar_un
I am with you on this. I find DDG completely unusable. The kinds of things
that I search for are generally daily or weekly recent items and DDG never
gets this stuff indexed quickly enough. Not even from the largest papers.

I am sure it’s fine for more evergreen content like SO, but for current news
it’s awful.

~~~
stinos
_I am with you on this. I find DDG completely unusable_

Ha but my point was just to explain how it works. I've been using DDG for
years and find it extremely usable :)

------
tills13
I think where Google really shines (in addition to its personalized results)
is tackling _vague_ searches with ease.

The other day, I couldn't remember what the title of a food-y documentary show
I had watched on Netflix was - so I googled "netflix food show asian host."
It's the first result on Google and a direct link to its Netflix page (as
opposed to a blog or something). On DuckDuckGo, it's not listed at all.
There's definitely room for improvement.

While 20m searches per day is impressive in a vacuum, it's more or less a
rounding error on Google's numbers.

------
flowardnut
I've tried it, and wasn't pleased with search results. I'd consistently try
vague searches, not find it on DDG, but it'd be the top result on Google.

I'll give it another swing, we need some viable alternatives.

~~~
brentadamson
[https://jivesearch.com/](https://jivesearch.com/). I run it and made an
update this week that greatly improved our search results. 100% open source,
has all the !bangs and tons of instant answers.

------
cabaalis
I've switched all my devices to ddg and Firefox. Automatically logging me into
Chrome was just emotionally too much, even if it did not send a single extra
bit to Google.

I miss the summary responses at the top of search results because they made
Google much more of a reference. For example, defining words, quick view of
Wikipedia results, etc.

I do still use maps, for now.

~~~
clubm8
On the maps side of things, !osm searches open street map, which is not
perfect but decent enough for many cases.

(Satellite data + reviews are lacking, but if you're like me and look up
cities you see named in the news it gets the job done)

~~~
stinos
_it gets the job done_

and for usage like you mention it's also way faster than !gm

------
jstanley
I think it's absolutely fascinating how different people's opinions of DDG
are.

Personally I find it perfectly adequate and I literally never resort to
searching on Google.

Lots of people in this thread agree, but lots of others totally disagree.

What is so different about different people's search habits that make it good
enough for some but not for otherS?

~~~
tills13
+1. It's overall adequate for the average query but it falls completely flat
too often where a similar Google search returns exactly what you're looking
for.

------
askaboutit
Still use google for “150 usd to cad” conversions. Use it for translation. Use
it for relevant news. Use it for accurate localized searches. Use it for
finding relevant sourcing of companies. Calling DuckDuckGo a replacement of
google is no where near right. Bing is more relevant. And people seem to hate
on Bing. The only reason people love DuckDuckGo is because of the perceived
privacy. But the NSA blows that right away.

~~~
ktosobcy
> 150 usd to cad

Works in DDG :-)

~~~
askaboutit
Never seen it work on mobile. Just tested it on Pc and it does work.

~~~
ktosobcy
Works (for me) on mobile and I used it frequently in last couple of months.
Firefox for android with ddg set as default search engine.

------
EastSmith
My son saw me using DDG instead of Google, asked me about it and one week
later I saw he had installed it on his laptop. He also tells everyone at his
school about DDG.

------
blendo
About six months ago, Google began presenting unsolvable Captchas on
iOS/Safari while using a VPN (Private Internet Access). DDG just works.

------
abrowne
I'd tried DDG a while back and Google seemed massively better, but I've been
more impressed lately.

The "bangs" feature never appealed to me much because I already have ~25
custom search engines in Firefox that I have keywords set to.

I've been trying Qwant (Lite) recently as a Google alternative, and it's
pretty good, but I find myself searching for the things like "500 mxn in usd"
or "30 days from 29 sep 2018, and Qwant doesn't answer these. It looks like
DDG's "instant answers" does do this, so I'm going to try it again.

I also like the appearance options, such as setting your own font, so I can
use Source Sans Pro, and that it shows a MapBox/OpenStreetMap map, but you can
set it to open directions in Google (or Bing or OSM).

------
sbanach
Google claims 3.5 billion queries per day, so approaching 1% of that.

~~~
romed
How can DDG make a living at 350 queries per second?

~~~
utopcell
260 qps to be exact. That is not negligible.

~~~
romed
Well, it's pretty small. I'm just multiplying though here the CTR and the CPC
and the QPS. I guess they can probably serve DDG from a handful of machines,
since they don't own the search stack.

~~~
utopcell
Yeah, but they pay for the web results

------
moritzsimon
I hope its another sign of rising privacy awareness ...

~~~
barking
Probably a stupid question but am I correct in assuming that you might as well
use Google as use ddg on chrome?

~~~
wongarsu
Only if you are logged into Chrome and sync your browsing history. Even then
you still gain the non-privacy benefits like ddg not constructing filter
bubbles (at least not to the extend of google)

------
Springtime
A combination of Google's results degrading so miserably in the last few years
and DDG's improvement to image search results (more pages of them and better
filtering options) led me to use it much more regularly.

At this point it's less that DDG has noticeably better results now but rather
Google's results for enough queries are useless to me that some alternative
may as well be used.

Edit: edited out digression on the quality of Google's results since it's
hardly anything that hasn't been written about prior.

------
dmitripopov
20 years ago Google Search was met with similar enthusiasm. I like DDG, but I
don't see any reason why they would not pursue profits increase path once they
become No 1 search engine.

~~~
themodelplumber
I mean, it's not like "find a new favorite search engine every 15-20 years" is
_that_ bad a situation.

------
MrQuincle
A while ago I switched to duckduckgo.com for a while until I applied for an
ESTA visa and wasn't paying attention. I shouldn't have gone for the top
result, I know... On my flight to the US my bank received already three
fraudulent creditcard transactions. Banks from my country are very quick
though and froze everything. However, it makes me realize personally that
ranking algorithms are important, especially if you're in a hurry.

PS: The governmental site is now at rank 1 on duckduckgo.

~~~
marcosdumay
Unfortunately, I would advise against not paying attention. The amount of
scamming sites on Google's ad-based front-page is much larger than DDG.

There is really no place to run, the internet is a dangerous place.

------
__s
Explain? Graph looks like you could say that at any point in time

~~~
kalleboo
If you change it to a 7-day average instead of 365-day average you can see it
clearer (click the "365" text box)

------
klancaster
Except for searches on Google Scholar, ddg is my primary search engine. Very
few times have I found that I get better results in Google.

------
fmajid
I’ve been using DDG for 8 years now based on Salvatore Sanfilippo’s (of Redis
fame) recommendation, but unlike him I hardly ever resort to !google

[https://usesthis.com/interviews/salvatore.sanfilippo/](https://usesthis.com/interviews/salvatore.sanfilippo/)

------
markatkinson
I switched a week ago! But I must say I still have to hitup Google quite
often, the search results are not as good.

------
grimgrin
Since this is a DDG thread, I just wanna highlight a thing I did in vim
recently

Using vim you may know you can define the `keywordprg` to use when pressing
`K` on a word (in command mode). This is going to, if able, show you some form
of documentation

Python is already using `pydoc` in this case.

I wanted something for the other instances, and I wanted to try getting DDG to
be an ok solution, since it has that Q&A view.

Here's what I ended up with (for now, surely evolving -- not perfect)

note: you could put this in a ftdetect/javascript or whatever directory, but
this is to be generalized for my case, and so I use an autocmd:

    
    
      autocmd Filetype * if &ft!="python" && &ft!="vim"
        \ | let &l:keywordprg=fnamemodify($MYVIMRC, ":h") . "/search.sh " . &l:filetype | endif
    

Sorta ugly but hey, I don't want to overwrite the keywordprg used by python
and vim (if you're parsing a vim plugin you did not write, you may want to
press K on a thing to understand what it is)

And in your your vimrc's root you'll need `search.sh` with these contents:

    
    
      # searches the filetype & keyword
      # in case of multiple filetypes (javascript.jsx) we just use the first
    
      firefox "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=$(echo $1| cut -d'.' -f1)+$2"
    
    

Cool, now press K on a thing and assuming you use firefox, hopefully the
results are OK, heh. It could be improved.

As an example I just pressed `K` on the word `import` in a `javascript` file:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+import&atb=v132-3_j&ia=...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+import&atb=v132-3_j&ia=qa)

If you're using another browser, you could probably just use `x-www-browser`
in place of firefox, to launch your default browser (in the case of linux)

------
phrixus
I love that they make their traffic numbers available. I have been using ddg
and graphing/predicting the next days traffic since March here:
[https://qunc.co/ddg](https://qunc.co/ddg).

Definitely a different trajectory since late summer.

------
raffael-vogler
I would like to switch but the search results for German language queries are
too subpar as of now.

------
trts
Yesterday my dad mentioned off-hand that he had switched to duckduckgo. While
they are still less than a rounding error of all search traffic (this site
says Google itself has 3.5bn daily searches
[https://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-
statistics/](https://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/)), it
interested me to know that someone I know outside of the technosphere had
learned about it and decided to change due to its privacy merits.

Also makes me wonder if the implication is that DDG may be poised to become
the choice among older, conservative users and whether that will influence the
way it markets itself.

------
_emacsomancer_
As a search alternative I've really enjoyed using searx [
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx) ]
instances for the past 6 months or so. Searx, like DDG, aggregates from search
providers including Google, Bing, (Wikipedia, DDG, etc.)b ut you can customise
it to control exactly which search providers it pulls from. And it has
!shortcuts to quickly specify individual search providers, like !ddg for DDG.
Source code available:
[https://github.com/asciimoo/searx](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx)

------
4ad
It's good for everyone that DDG usage is increasing, however, the lack of any
kinks, sudden slope increases in the graph tells me weren't any particular set
of events that caused people to switch. Rather, they got "fed up with google"
at their own pace, and it wasn't any one particular thing that Google did that
caused a mass exodus.

That's sad, really, because it means people as a large group don't care about
any particular anti-privacy thing that Google did. I would be interesting to
see in a few months whether the current Chrome fiasco will have had any
effect, but I doubt it.

~~~
leoxvi
Don't think so. Lately Google has really messed with the trust of their Chrome
& Chromium users.

I switched to Firefox + DDG recently, and I don't think I'm alone with this
action. Switching takes only a few minutes and is really worth it IMHO.

------
vfinn
DDG is the default search engine in Tor browser, which explains at least my
personal DDG usage. Google is also becoming less likeable as a whole, and
people in general are more concerned about their privacy than before.

------
needle0
Wrote this before and writing again, but DDG is abysmal when it comes to non-
English language searches, at least according to my experience with using it
in Japanese. I’ve switched to StartPage in places where I can (unfortunately
SP isn’t in the default search engine list of many mobile browsers). Perhaps
in English it’s good enough to not prepend every search with !g, but it’s
still quite far from that point in JP. I keep wondering what kind of staffing
they have for improving non-English language searches, if any at all.

------
conquistadog
Is there a way to exclude results that don't actually contain all of the
search terms? For example, results for +chicken +neutrino should not include
this [1] because the word chicken isn't there. Quotes and plus signs both fail
this everywhere I know of in 2018.

[1] [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/once-again-
physicist...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/once-again-physicists-
debunk-faster-light-neutrinos)

------
mclightning
I just encountered this as I was having issues with google results. I thought
maybe something is wrong with google and people are switching yo duckduckgo.

Seriously I just searched something on google and second page of results are
total crap. When I switch to duckduckgo with same keywords I get relevant
results.

For the record, keyword I was searching for was "first man curiositystream",
on Google I get a bunch of fake websites on second page of results, sited with
lots of random words in description for seo hacks.

------
reaperducer
I was using Duck Duck Go exclusively on all of my Macs, but I'm back to
Google.

The reason for the change is that Duck Duck Go disabled its tracker blocking
in Safari.

I read the explanation from DDG's web site, and it seemed to boil down to
something like the new version of Safari would require people to opt-in to
DDG's tracker blocking, and since that would be confusing for people, it's
gone.

Well, anti-tracking is the whole reason people use DDG, both the search
engine, and the privacy plug-in.

I hope someone else steps up to the plate.

~~~
class4behavior
>and since that would be confusing for people, it's gone.

Not sure what text you've read, but they've removed the feature because Safari
12 disables the entire extension when it discovers the API calls related to
that function.

Furthermore tracker blocking is not part of the search engine and definitely
not the reason why people switch to DDG, but the extension only. And it is
redundant on browsers that offer it themselves or when other extensions
include that function.

------
0xmohit
I've been using DDG for a couple of years now and never feel like using any
other search engine for "better" results.

Bangs are a really cool feature.
[https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

Not to mention instant answers. [https://duck.co/help/features/instant-
answers-and-other-feat...](https://duck.co/help/features/instant-answers-and-
other-features)

------
walterbell
Thanks for the reminder, just realized that iOS on Safari offers DuckDuckGo as
a search engine option, and that !sp can be used to proxy Google searches via
Safari.

------
anoplus
I decided to switch to firefox and DDG this week after seeing post on Chrome's
new cookies policy. The post helped me be more aware and affected my choice.

------
lazypenguin
DDG works well for me in 90% of cases. Sometimes when I am searching an
obscure technical issue I revert back to Google. However the biggest feature
that is missing for me is custom date range searches. Google has a "1 year
search" and a "custom range" search while DDG only goes up to 1 month. It
would be helpful when I am searching for more current information but need a
bigger range than 1 month.

------
shams93
It's really the best display of what gifted modern developers can do with Perl
and why Perl is actually still a uniquely powerful language.

~~~
walterbell
Any reference on DDG's use of Perl, e.g. which Perl version/VM, libraries and
frameworks they use?

Edit: 2009 architecture blog post,
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130225033410/http://www.gabrie...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130225033410/http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-
duck-go-architecture.html)

~~~
kbenson
A little searching and reading on /r/perl yielded this.[1]

1:
[https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/DuckDuckGoPerl](https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/DuckDuckGoPerl)

------
BeetleB
I also suggest trying searx:
[https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/](https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/)

You can use one of the online instances (with no guarantees on privacy), or
just host it yourself. I set it up on my PC recently and it's "good enough"
for me. Furthermore it likely has more features than DDG and startpage.

~~~
brentadamson
Another option to self host is
[https://jivesearch.com/](https://jivesearch.com/). Has !bangs and instant
answers, etc. I run it and am happy to answer any questions.

------
dpcan
Serious question: why does everyone trust DuckDuckGo?

~~~
fghtr
Trust is not a boolean (trust / no trust). We trust DDG more than Google and
that's enough. Also, their official privacy policy says they do not track:
[https://duckduckgo.com/privacy](https://duckduckgo.com/privacy) while Google
admits permanent tracking.

------
Zarath
I've been slowly switching over. It's now the default search engine on both my
phone, laptop, and desktop. There are still certain queries where I
instinctively use google because I have a feeling they will be better for what
I need.

I was looking to make the switch for a while but had trouble breaking the
habit. I found slowly switching each device over was the best way.

------
mynameishere
And people trust XYZ website because? Okay, whatever reasons you have, I deny.
They want money, and they'll take it as it comes like anyone else. Quit being
a sap.

But in any case it's really creepy how every time this website is mentioned
its whole marketing department seems to show up. "I use DDG exclusively
now..." Good for you.

~~~
the_other_guy
I know why you're being downvoted, I am sure it's a pure conicidence this
website is being shilled very hard in Reddit and HN over the past 24 hours :D

~~~
patrickbolle
Hah, I posted this because I saw it on Reddit and realized nobody had posted
it on HN yet. I wish I was getting paid to shill companies, that would be
fantastic!

------
danielecook
If you have not used it and are a developer, you should check it out. It
integrates stackoverflow answers which I have found to be very helpful. The
results have been good enough about 90% of the time. In rare cases where they
are not you can add a !g to your query and it will return the google results.

------
pi-squared
I'm happy to switch to DDG from Evil Google, but what stops them from becoming
as "evil" as Google at some point? It's a for-profit organization relying on
ads and sure - its selling point now is privacy but other than the word of the
author, what else is there that at some point when it grows enough it won't
start to slowly break that promise? Why is it not open source/federated? Why
has it stopped the DuckDuckHack project (which was the bit that was open
source)? This is probably the one search engine that has been able to gain a
lot of privacy-centered/hacky individuals mostly (I think, may be wrong)
through marketing/PR. If the causes are really that privacy centered, why not
restructure it as non-profit + open source + decentralized? Not saying it's
easy, but the marketing part (which I consider equally or even more difficult
- see Bing with all MS budget and efforts), has already gathered a lot of
interest for such a project.

~~~
brentadamson
I'm with you! I've been developing
[https://jivesearch.com/](https://jivesearch.com/), which is basically an open
source version of DDG. Has all the !bangs and tons of instant answers. The
best part is that if you are paranoid about privacy or don't trust me for some
reason you can leave me out of the equation and run it yourself. Would love
your feedback on it.

------
djhworld
I use DDG as my daily driver.

Shamefully I don't make extensive use of the features though (e.g. bangs etc),
mainly because I forget them. It's a great search engine though and just gets
out of the way to the point where I don't really think about it.

------
Simon_says
What is DDG's business model?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
As we, on HN, were song for the ride to done extent I got the impression that
Weinberg (sp?) was doing it for idealistic reasons rather than having a
business model to start with.

Anyone know what headcount they're working with now?

------
stockkid
I love DDG! It's been my main search engine for some time now. But sometimes
when I am searching for a solution for complex problems, I fall back to google
by using `g!` because that, time and again, seems to take me to the answers
faster.

------
mogadsheu
I sense this is a general trend away from big tech and back towards the
earlier days of a less centrally driven internet.

It's kind of a nice reminder of how competitive and dynamic the internet
really is. I hope it can stay that way with Net Neutrality.

------
carlospwk
The strength of privacy on DDG is also its weakness. Since everyone gets the
same results on all searches, there is no localization to any of it. I gave it
a try earlier this year but just couldn’t make it work and switched back to
Google.

~~~
climb_stealth
I found that setting the country in the top left corner helps a lot.

~~~
carlospwk
I didn't realize there was a setting like that, thanks!

------
oth001
Why not StartPage?

~~~
vezycash
StartPage is barebones Google without the tracking.

~~~
Kiro
DDG is barebones Bing without the tracking.

~~~
jqgatsby
I think a lot of the people here raving about how great duckduckgo is do not
understand that it's just a layer on top of Bing results. You could run Bing
(or Google for that matter) in an incognito window and get the same effect.

What I'd like to see is an ad-free search engine that is open-source or
subscription-based. DDG doesn't solve any of the fundamental problems with the
search ecosystem.

~~~
patrickbolle
"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources,[45] including
Yahoo! Search BOSS; Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha; Bing; its own Web crawler (the
DuckDuckBot); and others.[3][45][46] It also uses data from crowdsourced
sites, including Wikipedia, to populate "Zero-click Info" boxes – grey boxes
above the results that display topic summaries and related topics.[10]"

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview)
\-
[https://duck.co/help/results/sources](https://duck.co/help/results/sources)

~~~
Kiro
From your link:

> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These
> include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers,
> DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in
> our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the
> search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including
> Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

So in other words all the traditional link results are from Bing and Yahoo.
The other 400 sources and their own crawler are only for things like Instant
Answer boxes at the top (which are great btw).

------
teabee89
The chart should either have a title with "Number of Direct Queries" and
Y-axis numbers such as "20M", or keep the title "Direct Queries in Millions"
and have Y-axis numbers simply be "20".

------
hnruss
I’ve heard the same complaint about the results a lot, but I’ve never
understood it. I have never noticed much of a difference. Does anyone have
concrete examples of search queries that Google returns more accurate results
for?

------
kumarvvr
I use DDG almost exclusively now. I do a lot of search and find on various
tech and political topics and It has served me well.

However, I wish the search engine space evolves into a more diverse set of
competing companies.

------
tyjen
I've used Google to search for as far as I can remember, but recently switched
to DuckDuckGo completely. Sorry, but the politicization of Google and the
privacy issues are too much to ignore anymore.

------
dwighttk
The bangs I use most often are !az and !w

For a long time I used !img a lot, but they've incorporated native image
search so I use it less.

I never used !g much, (not counting !img), but I can't remember the last time
I used it.

------
fillipvt
Aww this is such great news. Didn't know how I missed it. Really nice to see
privacy being relevant to more people. Been using since 2016 and the results
have improved tremendously!

------
sv12l
I too made a switch a week ago to Firefox + DDG, working well so far.

------
FullMetalBitch
I have been using ddg for a long time and I can't be happier with it, at first
I used !g a lot but now I search it all on ddg with the ocassional visit to
startpage.

------
rick22
Google is becoming very much anti-anonymous. Its not possible to create gmail
account anymore without phone number. Wish there is something like DDG for
gmail.

------
fogetti
Cool. I am rooting for them to become even more successful.

------
ajcodez
I was using DuckDuckGo for a day or two due to Google latency issues. I’m
would check again in a couple days to make sure it’s permanent growth.

------
gerenuk
Curious how much data they are covering and what kind of stack is powering
DuckDuckGo? Anyone knows in-depth except highscalability article.

~~~
Kiro
None, they get all their results from Bing. Stack is Perl though.

------
dreix
I'd use it daily if there wasn't such a lag after each query. Google works
instantly ddg takes about 2 seconds to return results

------
csraghunandan
I've been using DuckDuckGo for almost a year now and for most of the cases,
it's almost as good as google

------
josteink
I like how the stats are numbers and just that.

No creepy segmentation or deep analysis of the privacy-invading kind like
Google and Facebook.

Go DDG!

------
tjoff
Inspires hope :) I realize I'm unsure what DDGs main source of income is?
Still ads but not personalized?

~~~
amelius
At least they seem to have more monetization options than Wikipedia, which has
no ads at all.

Also, ads related to the current query can be considered personalized.

------
elvirs
just installed it on firefox. searched for myself, not really impressed with
relevancy of the results but it did surface pages that I had not seen on first
two pages of google. so im guessing its not really a replacement to google but
a decent alternative

------
mhb
It would probably explode more if they would add the ability to search within
the past year.

------
GuyPostington
I had no idea that DDG was Perl based. This gives me a whole new level of
respect for DDG.

------
ZiggyCrane
Yeah, I would use it if they change their name. IT feels like kid came up with
it.

~~~
mario0b1
> I would use it if they change their name. Sure, the name might not be the
> catchiest one, but shouldn't be things like ethics, usability/functionality
> and so on way above this? Dropping something because it has a bad name seems
> odd. Even if it has a ""bad"" name, people would come up with a catchy
> phrase for it sooner or later. It just has to get rolling - for which the
> name might be contra productive, that's right.

------
beefman
I like how none of the events called out on the chart had any noticeable
effect.

------
bit_4l
DDG has been waiting for this moment for quite a long time.

------
_eht
When can I get my privacy first @duckduckgo email address?

~~~
notriddle
At protonmail.com

At least, DDG themselves recommend it.

------
consultSKI
Love it. It's on all my devices.

------
lucb1e
Nowhere on the page does it say "exploding", OP is exaggerating what is
roughly linear growth. I think the title should be edited.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying this is not worth posting or should be taken
down, just "exploding" does not even remotely describe DDG's traffic. The post
was interesting, only OP's fabricated title is inaccurate.

Edit 2: Several comments mention the graph does show daily searches, and is
therefore showing exponential growth. My reason for thinking it's cumulative
and not daily, is because it says below that the daily record is 29 million
searches and that the cumulative number is 22.569 billion. When hovering over
the last value in the graph, it shows 22.2 billion.

For the record, the current title is "DuckDuckGo Usage is exploding right
now".

~~~
rectang
+1

The submitted title "DuckDuckGo Usage is exploding right now" is
editorializing and is against the HN site guidelines. It should be changed to
the actual page title, "DuckDuckGo Traffic".

ETA: I emailed the mods.

~~~
patrickbolle
Woops.

~~~
rectang
Heh. I'm rooting for DDG, too. Let's just fix, forget, and move on. :)

~~~
sctb
Done! All's well.

------
funkythings
I really want to love DuckDuckGo, but for programming things I search for the
results are simply to weak.

~~~
OnlyLys
I am inclined to agree. I've tried DDG a few times for programming stuff and
the results were less satisfactory compared to Google. And actually in
general, when I do searches with abstract keywords, Google gets the meaning
far better than DDG.

For example, earlier today I was thinking about the mess that is USB-C
standards. I decided to search for Reddit articles through the search phrase
'USB C mess site:reddit.com'.

On Google all of the first 10 results were exactly what I want. But on
Duckduckgo, only the second and fifth results out of the first 10 were what I
want.

------
Go0the0gophers
I prefer qwant

------
the_other_guy
Search "go vs rust" and set the filter to the "past month" in both Google and
DuckDuckGo. I can go on and on, but this is just a simple evidence of how
inferior DuckDuckGo is. Also DuckDuckGo is incapable of indexing client-side
rendered HTML which has become increasingly important over the past few years.

EDIT: I would like to hear any logical response from those who downvote me

~~~
kazen44
you actually do not provide evidence for this. Mainly because google's
searching is subjective. Your result for "go vs rust" might be entirely
different from mine on google. mind you i don't actively use DDG, but them
being privacy first, i assume they do not apply your prefence to search
results this way.

Duckduckgo seems very useful to getting out of the specific bubble google has
created for in relation to your search history.

(ps, i did not downvote you btw).

~~~
the_other_guy
>you actually do not provide evidence for this

I did, I listed 1 big evidence (the lack of indexing client-side rendered
HTML), and also a simple example "rust vs go" that came to my mind. Take
another example that I just tried, search "classical music only" in both
engines and see the difference, this is a very popular youtube channel and has
a website but nothing is shown in DDG for me.

As much as I want to join you guys against the big fat lazy monopolist called
Google, I can't just make myself blind and claim that DDG is anywhere near to
Google when it comes to accuracy or sophistication. If you really appreciate
privacy, why not try something like Startpage instead of hyping another for-
profit company?

~~~
kbenson
> I can't just make myself blind and claim that DDG is anywhere near to Google
> when it comes to accuracy or sophistication.

You don't have to, that's what !g is for. I start all my searched at DDG, and
if I'm not seeing the results I want, I use !g. Somewhere around 80%-90% never
require a redirect to Google for additional results, and that's a a number I
can live with.

------
aaaaaaaaaab
What is DDG’s business model?

~~~
leoxvi
Advertising (MS Bing + Yahoo) and affiliate-linking (Amazon):
[https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-
affiliates](https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates)

I hope DDG becomes smarter with AI-assisted searching, eg. by doing semantic
sentence encoded searching, like Google Books showed a while back:
[https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=best%20search%2...](https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=best%20search%20engines&)

------
gcb0
ironically instead of just giving me a link, now dyckduckgo results list will
track me to known which link I clicked.

this is the beginning of the end for duckduckgo :(

------
wpdev_63
hi google!

