
DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year - nichodges
http://qz.com/574853/duckduckgo-the-search-engine-that-doesnt-track-its-users-grew-more-than-70-this-year/
======
newscracker
> “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg
> says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.”

It won't help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after
a single trial because the results are not great.

I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really
big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very
happy with the results from DDG. For _most of my searches_ though (on
technical and other matters), I end up doing a second search on Start Page or
Google because DDG still does not have search by date and the search results
are nowhere close to Google.

I do have and use DDG as my default search engine in the hope that DDG keeps
analyzing the volume of !s or !g queries as an indicator of how much DDG is
lacking and takes action to improve it.

~~~
sundarurfriend
FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or
so. It _used_ to be that 90% of my searches ended up repeated with !g to go to
google, but nowadys I'd guess that's like 30%, and even among those, half the
time google's answer quality ends up the same.

The only cases where Google is predictably and consistenly superior are 1.
error/diagnostic messages: DDG still sucks at precision search, and quotes are
not always the answer; 2. queries that require Natural Language Processing:
Google understands stuff like "the bad moustache guy from XYZ series" where I
myself have only a vague idea of what I'm looking for.

And oftentimes the Instant Answers end up offsetting somewhat poorer quality
of results, so kudos to DDG for coming up with those.

(None of this is meant to disqualify your experience though, just expressing
my own joy at their results having improved for my use case.)

~~~
temp
>FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year
or so.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same.

As someone from a smaller and non-English-speaking country, I doubt there'll
ever be an effort to improve their results for my language and considering
that even Bing does an absolutely terrible job at it, Google is my only choice
for when doing local searches.

It's like all search engines apart from Google are stuck 20 years in the past
with how bad they are.

~~~
contingencies
This could probably be fairly generalized to "90% of Silly Valley lacks
internationalisation experience"... I type this as an Aussie/German/Kiwi on a
Thai keyboard (desktop; normally I'm on a French Macbook Pro) here in
southwest China.

------
bsbechtel
Most of the comments here are complaining that, while people like the idea of
DDG, the search results are poor. Two comments regarding that:

1) the only way DDG is going to improve search results is by you using it
regularly. Using it regularly drives not only revenue, allowing them to hire
additional developers, but it also drives feedback to help DDG improve search
results.

2) I suspect that the difference in search results may partly be conditioned
responses. We are accustomed to what we find through Google, so when DDG
presents something that looks different (e.g. showing a different answers site
that has the exact same result), we feel uncomfortable and think it's not what
we want. I think this is just something that takes time to adjust to, but also
something DDG needs to think about how try to figure out how to overcome.

~~~
forgetsusername
> _the only way DDG is going to improve search results is by you using it
> regularly._

For what company or product is that not the case? Unfortunately, most people
(myself included) aren't interested in integrating inferior products into our
lives with the hope that "one day" they might be as good.

I decided to default to DDG last year to see how it was, and because my online
privacy _is_ worth something. I found the results lacking, having to Google
things anyway, and eventually just went back to Google.

~~~
AdamSC1
Hi forgetsusername,

The results have come along way over the past year, and we've also added a
feedback tool that lets you share with us when you feel an answer was lacking.

If you are interested in trying us again sometime I know we'd love to hear the
feedback as we aim to provide a great search experience without sacrificing
your privacy.

We also have our "!Bangs"
([https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)) which allow you
to re-direct your search directly to over 7000 providers including sites like
Amazon, Twitter, Stack overflow and even Google. In those cases you find a
result lacking you can quickly forward the search to another provider without
manually navigating or switching your default. We understand there will be
times you want to search other sites and so we make that easy to do. (Although
we do hope to continue to lower the need for that in the future).

~~~
johnsonjo
Bangs are honestly one of my favorite parts of Duck Duck Go and I actually
found out about it from a friend a while after I switched from Google. It
completely changed how I used DDG.

------
bad_user
I'm trying to use DuckDuckGo, but for now the local search results are really,
really poor. I can't blame them much though, because Yahoo and Bing suck as
well. But then Bing's index is in fact the only competition Google has and
DuckDuckGo cannot improve as long as they depend on Bing.

One favorite example that I've been using for feedback is when I'm searching
for "restaurante" (the Romanian word for "restaurants"), in Google Search I'm
getting links to nearby restaurants. Which is normal since they've got my
location and so on. But they also know that in my country (Romania) the people
are speaking Romanian and so they are showing me results in the Romanian
language of restaurants from my city.

On the other hand in DuckDuckGo:

1\. The instant answer is terribly wrong, mistakenly identifying a plain
vocabulary word from at least 3 romance languages (!!!) as being the name of
some insignificant 1-star GitHub project that nobody cares about. Ouch!

2\. Even though the region selected is Romania, aproximately the first eleven
results contain the translation of the word "restaurante" from Spanish, a link
to some "el Restaurante" magazine I've never heard about and a link to some
latin restaurant named Kuuk from Mexico, plus a "Top 10 Berlin Restaurants"
(needless to say Berlin is not in Romania)

3\. Out of 30 links I get, none of them is related to Romanian restaurants,
Romanian cuisine, or anything related to Romania, even though the selected
region is Romania and that word is a Romanian word.

4\. OK, lets assume that some users searching for "restaurante" are interested
in Spanish results. Well, one problem would be that Mexico is different from
Spain, but lets ignore that as well. The biggest problem is that this set of
results is completely useless for Spanish speakers as well.

~~~
temp
I can only reiterate those same experiences for another locale. Google
provides an almost seamless experience when I do searches in English and in my
local language. I don't feel like I've downgraded when doing a search locally.
None of the other search engines even bother.

Which means that despite being incredibly privacy-conscious, and trying to
avoid Google services like a plague, there's literally no alternative for me
whatsoever to Google when searching online.

------
wila
DDG has been my search engine of choice for the past few years and in my
experience it is pretty rare that I have to use google for better results. In
general I'm quite happy with it.

One thing I would love to see as a feature is the ability to add under
settings a list of sites I'd prefer not to see any results from.

For example experts-exchange where they want you to sign up to see the answer.
There's also a bunch of scraping websites that don't have actual answers which
just pollute the results. Being able to suppress that kind of site would be
wonderful.

I'm aware you can use an option on the search itself, problem is that the list
of sites I like to remove from the search is too long to type each time.

~~~
mrspeaker
I'd love there to be a "I'm a developer" mode: I know it goes against the
point of not tracking people but there are so many tech words that are common
nouns etc, and providing a bit of context would prevent a lot of g! searches
from me (see example:
[https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/672115832772784128/phot...](https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/672115832772784128/photo/1))

~~~
wila
You could use the bangs for that:

[https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech](https://duckduckgo.com/bang?c=Tech)

------
scope
DDG results have improved tremendously, top stack overflow / github matches
are shown partially which is really neat

I FULLY switched to DDG (& also away from Chrome) when I found out when I
click save password on login forms my password is sent to Google Servers (I
must have missed it on the TOC)

~~~
antome
DuckDuckGo really is good enough to use on a daily basis now. One big gripe I
still have however, is that there seems to be no way to filter by time. I
still have to go to google if I want to find a news article or topic which is
recent, or within a certain period.

~~~
tagawa
This is a popular request and one we're working on. Admittedly we've been
saying that for a while but it's getting close.

~~~
dingaling
A really good filter ( for me anyhow ) would be 'prior to this [ week | month
]', since often I want to search for things from the period _before_ they were
news

~~~
tagawa
Interesting idea - I hadn't thought of that. Duly noted.

------
myztic
DuckDuckGo really looses the battle when it comes to search results.

And since they make the case with privacy, I also want to make clear, they
don't loose because Google tracks us all, even if you are logged out from your
account, use vpn servers, delete all of your cookies and cache, Google is just
so much better and DuckDuckGo awful and some search results are just weird.

I tried once (it must have been this year) to use DuckDuckGo as my main search
engine, basically whenever I did not find something quickly enough I just
switched to Google and then found my object of desire often times instantly.
One of my VPN-Servers is blocked by Google and because of that I am using Bing
at the moment, which also seems so much better than DuckDuckGo was when I used
it.

I installed LinuxMint on a non-techy person's machine a while ago (few weeks)
and DuckDuckGo was set up as default search engine with Firefox, even that
person used Google, because he/she wasn't happy with the search results. Used
Google even though he/she had to manually go to google.com every single time

"We don't bubble you" is a unique selling point they have profited greatly
from, and that's what made them well known to begin with, nothing else really.

------
XJOKOLAT
Good to see them progressing.

I made the switch a year ago having found their results had improved greatly
to the point of "good enough". Before that I agree there was a problem.

For maybe 2-3% of the time I'll need to revert to google et al, but I see that
as a fair price/compromise for even a small taste of privacy ... which is like
tasting the purest of waters.

DDG is my default.

~~~
AdamSC1
Thanks XJOKOLAT,

We recently released a new feedback tool in the bottom right of the search
results page. For that 2-3% of time you feel the need to revert, please
consider taking the time to let us know why our results didn't work out for
you so we can drill down on improving them!

Thanks for your continued support!

------
lips
My experience has been reminiscent of the old SE days, when different engines
would often fare better/worse for varying queries, vs there being an all-out
winner. I think of DDG as avoiding a fair amount of overtly "consumer"
content. Google is great at getting to "interaction points," DDG is great for
information. I quite like the DDG ability to play embedded videos from the
search results page, and their accompanying privacy warning.

~~~
sundarurfriend
> I think of DDG as avoiding a fair amount of overtly "consumer" content.

True. Since all the 'content farms' out there are busy fighting the SEO war
specifically targeted at Google, Google results for some topics are just
stream after stream of useless generic garbage from non-experts. DDG, simply
by using a different search backend, avoids most of this and often gives much
better results in such cases.

------
takee
Has anyone considered that the slightly longer and forgettable name DuckDuckGo
might have something to do with the low mainstream presence? I think they
should rebrand and market with duckgo or maybe just duck.com if at all
practically possible.

~~~
AdamSC1
We recently commented about this on a Reddit thread too
([https://www.reddit.com/comments/3vtxib/duckduckgo_search_lik...](https://www.reddit.com/comments/3vtxib/duckduckgo_search_like_nobodys_watching/cxu4fy4))

We do have a short domain "[http://ddg.gg"](http://ddg.gg") although it is
worth noting that duck.com is owned by Google and points to their main search
engine. So it's not really an option for us.

~~~
burkaman
duck.com is explained here for anyone wondering:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/epd59/google_po...](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/epd59/google_points_duckcom_at_google_search_after_duck/c19v4cz)

It's not necessarily nefarious, the domain came from some unrelated
acquisition, but they didn't have to make duck.com point to Google.

------
rlv-dan
I've been using DDG for many years now, and I think the search results are
excellent in most cases. Sometimes I'm not satisfied, and try the same seach
on Google. Most of the time though, I get the same results there.

My only gripe is that the last half year or so, w3schools has been getting at
the top of the search results. (Previously w3schools did not show in the
search results.)

~~~
eridius
That's funny, one of my gripes with Google was their insistence for many many
years on making w3schools the first result for html-related queries. I haven't
ever noticed that with DDG, but to be fair I also don't do html-related
queries very often anymore (because the Dash app has supplanted any sort of
technical documentation search; if I want to know what an html tag does, I
just ask Dash to show me (developer.mozilla.org) docs).

------
CM30
It's not surprising, but if they really want to become mainstream, they'll
have to get people caring more about privacy than they already do. I mean
okay, the Snowden leaks and stuff about PRISM got a lot of people using it,
but those people were still most tech savvy types who value their privacy over
the quality of the search results.

DDG is getting better, but it'll have to beat Google and the likes on a
quality level if it's going to get the interest of people who don't seem to
give a damn about their privacy.

------
Dolores12
Using duckduckgo i found out that google blocks booksee.org domain. I spend
some time trying to find ebook using google, implying its the best search
engine in the world.

~~~
yohui
[https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright...](https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/booksee.org/)

------
dpcan
I feel like the search results are getting better.

EDIT: Complaint #1 removed. I can change the THEME in DDG to get blue links.
Awesome.

#2 Complaint is that I dislike the font-weight changes on search sites. I
don't need my search words bolded. I know what I searched for, I trust that
those words are in the search results, you don't need to show them to me.

It's actually the SUPPORTING words around my keywords that are going to make
me click them after I've already searched. So if anything should be bold, it
should be those words because they set each listing apart from the others.

The Positive (for me):

As I do SEO for some companies sometimes, I often times use DDG as a baseline
because it doesn't track me. If I see one of my companies ranked high in DDG
AND Google, I believe what I'm seeing in Google in terms of SEO A little more.
I know it's not really accurate, and I tell my clients this, but it's nice to
say that DDG is not tracked so it's not influenced by my previous searches,
and seeing a site ranked high there too is a really good thing in my opinion.

~~~
AdamSC1
Hi dpcan,

Thanks for the feedback! Did you know you can change themes from the settings
menu? You can then save them as a non-personalized cookie, anonymously to the
cloud via a unique passphrase, or via a URL. The bookmarklet tool in the
settings menu will build out a URL with any settings group so you can save,
share and use your settings without anything local.

For example here are the settings I use:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d&k5=-1&kaj=m&kd=1](https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d&k5=-1&kaj=m&kd=1)

Dark theme, metric system measurements, prompt for video play, prevent
redirect.

If you are a blue links fan you can try:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=c](https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=c)

That's our 'contrast' theme which pops out a bit more.

------
dexterchief
Wikipedia has lots of disambiguation pages but somehow this idea has never
made it into the search world. Perhaps the idea of a single text box that you
can type "Michelangelo" into is not a good one. Tracking the user so you can
get some context (is it Ninja Turtles or art history usually with this
person?) seems a logical extension of the lunacy of that situation.

I use DDG a fair bit but I feel like without revisiting that assumption that a
single context-free text box is even desirable, ditching the tracking (which I
am totally in favour of) feels like they are dooming themselves.

I've played a little with running Yacy locally and directing it to crawl only
sites I care about. So far that habit has not stuck.

The bangs are a step in the right direction. Suggesting additional search
terms isn't quite right, and neither is doing a site specific search since I
don't know what site will have the information.

Maybe a "metabang" where you search all the bangs in a category? "python
!!tech"

Anyway, its good to see DDG growing.

------
akkartik
I seem to have finally switched permanently a couple of days ago[1].
Pleasantly surprised.

[1] The clincher? Copying a link on Google and finding for the umpteenth time
that it was a #$%# redirect. (This is on my phone so greasemonkey plugins
don't help.) There comes a time when you say enough.

------
truncate
I recently started using DDG as my default search engine. I'm usually fine
with searches, however what troubles me most times is the extracted content on
result page. For example, when I search "How to make coffee"[1] the result
links are good for both, however the extracted text shown in Google results
are generally more relevant to my query. In this example, Google shows me
instructions to make coffee in each result, while DDG shows the first text it
could find which is totally irrelevant to what I want.

So in short, I feel a lag when deciding when and what to click with DDG.

[1] [http://imgur.com/a/7jCEH](http://imgur.com/a/7jCEH)

------
JayNeely
I started using DDG this year. I've found the main thing that drives me back
to Google (and frequently) is searching for anything where freshness of
results matters; that's where I'm seeing the biggest difference in quality of
results.

~~~
AdamSC1
Hey Jay,

This is something actively being worked on that we hope to have an update for
in 2016.

We also recently released a new "News Instant Answer" that pulls in fresh
relevant content on popular news topics. Have you come across that in your
searches? And, are there any specific topics where you are looking for more
freshness and currently aren't getting it?

------
lesdeuxmagots
FYI: DuckDuckGo primarily leverages the Yahoo BOSS api in the US.

~~~
adrtessier
I'm curious: who will they turn to if (when) Yahoo shuts the service down?
Bing?

~~~
infbtag
Their only options are Google, Bing, Yandex, Exalead, Gigablast, and Mojeek,
and most probably in that order as the last two need to grow considerably
first. Unless there's any others that have their own index?

~~~
AznHisoka
How is Google an option? They offer no API whatsoever

~~~
infbtag
StartPage uses Google so there must be a way.

~~~
AznHisoka
They probably scrape Google. Willing to bet there is no deal. Google would
never agree to such a thing. Even paying $XXXXX a month isn't worth it to
them.

~~~
infbtag
That's what I always thought but according to this they have a contract:
[https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...](https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/147/0/why-
does-google-let-startpage-access-their-search-results)

------
ssaddi
It's a great search engine, and gettig better with time ..

------
qwertyuiop924
I don't actually use DDG for privacy primarily. I use if for the instant
answer and !bang goodness. If you're a developer, both of these are
indispensable. If if the results don't work, you can always !g.

~~~
SteveNuts
I appreciate what DDG is trying to do, but I found myself using !g way too
often.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
It really depends on your use-case. But for me, it works really well, and I'm
glad it exists.

------
edpichler
It's really good to see that even in a such powerful monopoly that it is, the
"search" who Google has, it still have space for competition. DDG focus on a
niche on this, and they are growing.

------
tofupup
I made the switch. My biggest problem with the lack of privacy is that I don't
know in X years how my data will be used. In X years - laws may change - mores
may change - the fortune of google may change. It just doesn't seem prudent
for me and my progeny.

For example searching for information about cigarettes or cigar clubs - 30
years ago may have been socially acceptable. Today if that information were
available from the 80's it could provide signal for insurance companies
determining rates.

------
4lejandrito
Maybe slightly off topic but wouldn't it be nice to have something like WSQL
(Web Search Query Language) such as:

    
    
       "Select text from *.co.uk where page contains = XXXX and page.popularity > YY".
    

We then could have different implementations as we do with SQL (mariadb,
postgres...) name them Google, Duckduckgo, Bing...

I did a quick search on my default search engine (DDG) and couldn't find
anything related...

~~~
razakel
You're basically describing the Semantic Web.

------
andrea_sdl
Wow, so many people talking about how DDG is lacking good search results.

Here's my personal experience. I've tried using DDG 2 years ago, and it
sucked. In my language (italian) results were poor, and also for general
searches.

6 Months ago I gave it a try again, and I've been pleased enough to use it
both at work, at home and on my smartphone.

The results are not always perfect, but I find myself using !g bang mainly
when I feel there's something missing (which doesn't happen that much) or when
I need to find a very selective piece of information.

I also loved the integration with stack overflow. Works nicely, it doesn't
always "answer" your question, but just yesterday it did and the moment was
like "wow, it's getting interesting".

So, while I admit that DDG may not be ready for prime time yet, I guess
there's a chance that many of us (developers, etc) might start liking it and
using it constantly.

While it would be naive to say "I wouldn't go back to google", I'm now an
happy user of DDG, and I wasn't expecting it to begin with (In fact I was very
skeptical).

------
pcr0
I really like how their instant answers are open source, and they're really
nice. (e.g. npm, GitHub, regex/vim cheatsheet)

I do have 2 complaints, and together, they made me switch back to Google.

1) Results aren't as relevant, especially when I'm searching for very new or
specific things.

2) Speed. I'm not sure why, but DDG seems to stumble on some searches, which
end up taking 2-3x the time they're supposed to.

~~~
JTon
I haven't noticed speed issues. But I have noticed the relevancy issues. If
the first 5 search results in DDG don't seem relevant. I just bang out a
google search ("!g").

------
funkyy
In all honesty, despite me knowing about DDG for reaaaaalllly long time, I
still tend to forget their name. "something duck" is how non-tech people
reference it. Cant you really name it something easy to remember and (ouch)
Google like Duckgo? Or Ducker? Or anything else that can be pronounced by
anyone within one breath?

~~~
sgt
If you google 'duck' it should be in the top 5. For me it was the 3rd one, the
1st and 2nd being wiki-type articles.

~~~
AdamSC1
If you Google 'search engine' it's number one.

~~~
sgt
Slightly ironic though - using Google to google 'search engine'.

------
bane
I switched to DDG maybe about a year ago, not because of privacy concerns
exactly, but because I was getting concerned that Google's results were
getting less and less accurate (literal) for what I was searching for.

I think this is something that technical people tend to care about more than
non-technical. I find now that I'm using DDG for very specific searches and
Google for "fuzzier" things (via !g).

Google also tends to order results better than DDG, where DDG might have the
result I'm looking for in its result set, the relevance ranking of the results
isn't _quite_ as good as Google.

About the only other things I search Google for are images (!gi) and if I need
to constrain the date range down on the results (afaik DDG doesn't have any
way to say "between these two dates" or "in the last month").

------
Illniyar
If I remember correctly, DDG doesn't crawl the web on their own, so
considering the many comments here saying they stopped using DDG because of
bad result, is there any way for them to improve on this?

Are all improvements made to the actual search results caused by improved from
Yahoo or Bing ?

~~~
AdamSC1
Results are powered from hundreds of sources
[https://duck.co/help/results/sources](https://duck.co/help/results/sources)
and aided and refined by our community.

We recently added a feedback tool on our results page, so if you find a bad
result feel free to share the feedback!

------
jgalt212
I use DDG almost exclusively on my phone, and Google almost exclusively on my
laptop.

------
rodionos
Interactive DDG Search Traffic Stats:
[http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/e8635882/10/](http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/e8635882/10/)

------
xedarius
I love DDG but I think as the world turns away from document indexing and more
toward intent based search, plus the ever increasing use of implicit data (gps
location, speed of movement etc) - I can't see how DDG are going to grow.

Ultimately search will end up with something a bit like Siri (but something
that works). The hound demo (if real) is a very impressive glimpse of the
future of search.

For those who haven't seen it :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg)

------
makecheck
I generally like it but I definitely don't like some of its apparent
integrations.

For instance, I search for recipes a lot. And Yummly "wrappers" seem to come
up _a lot_ on DuckDuckGo, often barely acknowledged as being Yummly. I don't
know what Yummly is but it just seems _scummy_...it seems to wrap pages that I
know are _clearly_ recipes on other web sites, yet they're made to appear like
Yummly pages. Why? There's no reason for this kind of middle-man stuff.

------
pholz
On desktop I only use DDG, mostly because I think their visual design &
typography is much more pleasing than Google's, and the search results are
usually just as good.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Agreed. The new google logo looks like it was drawn with a Crayola.

------
msh
I love ddg for english searches.

For non english searches it is still behind google. For example "pizza name-
of-my-town" lacks half the pizza places google lists.

~~~
cJ0th
In case you are from Europe you may want to try
[https://www.qwant.com/web](https://www.qwant.com/web)

It certainly doesn't match google when it comes to local searches but I find
it a bit more pleasant than DDG.

------
hyperdunc
I've been using DDG almost exclusively for the past two years. It's improved a
lot in that time and now I hardly ever have to !g.

------
eva1984
Tried a few queries with it. Seems like its accuracy has improved greatly over
last year, but still throws me a Japanese article for no reason.

Search is really a very hard business, in terms of both technology and market.
I don't think they have Google level quality right now, so I won't consider
use it seriously.

~~~
tagawa
If you could remember which queries gave you a Japanese result I'd love to
look into it to help fix it.

------
sn
RE: [https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-
affiliates](https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates) I think
it would be cool if it was possible to do ads direct with DDG.

------
pilooch
DDG is basically a meta-search engine. It is then better to host it yourself
with [https://github.com/asciimoo/searx](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx)

Set it up remotely and you basicially have your own DDG.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
... but without a company and a community of hackers constantly working to add
more backends, more instant answers, more !bangs, and give you better results.
So why would I use it?

~~~
pilooch
You don't need a company for building a meta-search engine. And most
importantly, if you value privacy, you want the whole meta-thing to be open
source, always.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
My point isn't about privacy. If you really are that privacy-obsessed, than
building your own meta-search might be the best option for you. For me, I like
the fact the DDG's meta-search is incredibly well featured, with instant
answers, and many backends for that, its search, and !bangs. So if I'm not
that obsessive about privacy, why would I go to the trouble for a weaker
search with less features?

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Kenji
The privacy of DuckDuckGo is worthless when I click on the first link and it
includes ajax and fonts from the google domain (and facebook and twitter
buttons and whatnot) - might as well just type my search term in google.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Then use Ghostery. Or Privacy Badger. Also, I don't think the fonts can track
YOU, unless google's got your IP. Which they won't, unless you log into your
account. Which you won't, if you care about security. And if you don't, than
why are you complaining?

~~~
Kenji
Most sites rely on ajax and are completely unusable without it so I have to
make exceptions for google anyway.

Also, I'm not complaining at all, I am just stating that the privacy is almost
completely useless. I do have a google account, google mail, and so on. I
don't have a problem with it.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Well, privacy is somewhat useful if Google can't link your IP to you. Also I
was referring to Ghostery and Privacy Badger more for your concerns about like
buttons, analytics, and the like.

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korzun
Going to chime in on the whole 'results are getting better'.

They might be. On paper; because there is more data.

Unfortunately, nobody is accounting for the 'stale' factor.

Searching old news is well.. old news.

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gloves
And rightfully so.

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yclatewin2015
In all honesty, I don't care if they (google) track me. I just want to find
the right information as fast as possible.

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joryhatton
Much deserved progress.

