
Over one billion searches were made on DuckDuckGo in 2013 - orrsella
https://duck.co/blog/friends-newsletter-45
======
thrownaway2424
I choose to give people the benefit of the doubt regarding their own points of
view, so I am forced to consider the idea that "Duck Duck Go is a good search
engine" is a true fact to some people. That forces me to consider how this can
possibly be true. I find it's not true for me because of all the ways I
typically use Google, DDG does almost none of them. DDG doesn't have local
results (search "Chinese" on Google and then on DDG). DDG doesn't have recent
news (search "Earthquake" on Google and then on DDG). DDG does not have the
coverage to answer a narrow technical question like "does a c++ derived class
need to define its own destructor" (answer nowhere to be found on DDG;
perfectly relevant stack overflow result is #1 on Google). What DDG _does_
have is plain old search results, albeit not with Google's quality and, of
course, without any personalized input.

So for those of you who find DDG's generically mediocre retrievals sufficient,
I am interested to know what you use for my other cases. When you want to eat
Chinese food, do you always use Yelp? What do you use for recent event news?

~~~
ForHackernews
You can prepend g! to your DDG searches if the native results are
insufficient.

I don't want "personalized" search results. I don't want Google's algorithms
second-guessing what I searched for. If I want current news, I'll read the
BBC. If I want a stack overflow result, I'll do a search on SO.

~~~
raldi
Why the scare quotes?

~~~
alan_cx
Dunno if this a seperated by common punctuation thing, but to me, a Brit, I
dont even know the term "scare quotes". To me, its just emphasis.

~~~
raldi
Here are some examples of how they're used:

McDonald's is the only "restaurant" in town that's open today.

My four-year-old is "helping" me build a table.

Please escort this "gentleman" to the exit door.

~~~
gojomo
But sometimes, it's just meant as emphasis of the word, together with a nod to
the fact that the specific word may have been consciously chosen by others,
and you're reusing their label without fully endorsing it.

For example:

 _I don 't want the kinds of results Google calls "personalized"._

Using the quotes elsewhere alludes to that same sort of sentiment – referring
to something that others do literally call "personalized" – but in not so many
words.

There may also be a slight implication of a "scare" second-level of meaning –
maybe when Google claims the results are "personalized", that's really just
cover for "revenue-optimized despite what's best for me". But that sinister
reading isn't _required_ by the quotes, just vaguely hinted.

------
dredmorbius
I've been using DDG as my primary search engine since June, 2013. That's not
my first attempt to make a go of it, I took a couple of stabs at DDG over the
past year or two, but found that the results were less than satisfactory: slow
response, _no_ response, and often, poor matches on queries.

With the Snowden revelations and the abundantly clear trend of Google to
aggregate as much personally-identifiable information as possible, I made a
clean break in June, 2013. The performance and search quality are _vastly_
improved. And while I don't eschew _all_ Google products (though I'm making
drastically less use of them, and as little as possible while authenticated),
I find that using DDG as my first cut generally works.

For fallback, my usual scheme is DDG, !SP (StartPage, another proxying search
aggregator making more full use of Google), and if I'm still not fully
satisfied, Google itself.

There _are_ areas in which Google's search tools are still hugely superior:

⚫ Searching within a date range. DDG doesn't offer this option.

⚫ Some specialized search, in particular Google Books and Google Scholar.
Where Google focuses on its core competency of providing _search_ and not on
grabbing as much user data as possible, I find the company far more
acceptable.

⚫ Some deep-site searches. Google seems to crawl sites more deeply and in more
detail than DDG. I particularly rely on it for Reddit, whose own site search
excludes comments.

As I've noted, Google's biggest liability is that, no matter its best
intentions, it cannot provide any guarantee against a government-size advanced
persistent threat, especially not one with the law (constitutional or
otherwise) at its disposal:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1u356d/schmidt_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1u356d/schmidt_my_biggest_mistake_is_still_not_realizing/)

But overall, I'm hugely impressed with DDG.

For those who use console / terminal browsers such as w3m or links, the 'lite'
version puts the "search" button one tab following the search dialog:
[https://duckduckgo.com/lite](https://duckduckgo.com/lite)

And DDG's TTY mode (command-line interface) is teh awesomenessedness:

[https://duckduckgo.com/tty/](https://duckduckgo.com/tty/)

~~~
cromwellian
If Google can't protect its datacenter traffic from the NSA, or from the law,
what makes you think DDG can operate outside the law or protect itself from
NSA snooping?

~~~
dredmorbius
DDG's policy is to not log personally identifiable data. Google's present
business model is based on logging _enormous_ amounts of personally
identifiable data. Your search history for at least 18 months. Cross-
correlation between Search, YouTube, Gmail, G+, and other services. And on and
on. I detail much of this in the blog entry linked.

DDG _could_ be forced to put an upstream intercept which would log searches by
specific IPs, but that's outside their normal operational scope. It also
applies only to data-on-the-wire, not data-at-rest. In Google's case, your
aggregated history is sitting on their servers to be collected at any time.

If you don't trust DDG not to log your searches, going through Tor will give
you yet another degree of separation (there are also browser extensions such
as DisconnectSearch:
[https://disconnect.me/search](https://disconnect.me/search)).

As sobering as the disclosures from Snowden, Applebaum, and others have been,
the news appears to be that cryptographic methods _do_ work to protect privacy
or at the very least _greatly_ increase workload for surveillance.

And another aspect is that by encouraging and promoting alternatives to
Google, we're carving out at least a small niche in which privacy-focused
entrants to a vastly concentrated search market (Google scores in the
neighborhood of 85% of all search according to some metrics I've seen) might
be able to thrive.

~~~
cromwellian
Since the NSA "Muscular" program was known to have compromised datacenters
upstream, that's little consolidation if DDG has any multihomed datacenter
support and is not encrypting their inter-DC links or if the NSA has
compromised your hosting provider directly. Given that they have been shown to
actually intercept and plant modified hardware, there's really no guarantee
that they couldn't plant a tap. Point is, if DDG ever got a non-trivial
marketshare, there's little confidence that your systems are more secure than
Google's, regardless of capturing search history or not, or if they could not
be compromised by the same court demands that other top level providers are
under.

DDG's safety from the NSA is inversely proportional to its success in the
market.

~~~
dredmorbius
DDG uses https for its searches. I can't speak to its datacenter links, but
haven't checked to see if they address that in their FAQ / info pages.

------
hnriot
Don't you mean >1B searches were proxied to Bing, Google etc? Aside from being
an anonymizing proxy, I don't see any real reason for DDG. Maybe i'm wrong,
maybe the news meant you served > 1B searches from your own inverted index,
but I didn't see anything that suggested that.

~~~
cshimmin
Agreed, would be interesting to see how many of those searches ended in
"!g"...

------
Spittie
And I'm happy to say that my searches where in this billion too :)

I still find myself looking at Google for some queries, but this seems to
happen every day less and less.

Mostly local searches, as DDG is still very "english-centric". I don't know if
they trying to "fix" this, but I sure hope so.

Overall I still find it an awesome search engine, thanks to the 0-click box,
and the !bang syntax.

------
nathanb
I have DDG as my default search engine both at home and work now.

As a command-line junkie, I like it that I can access everything in one place.
Admittedly, maybe 1/3 of my DDG "searches" are actually commands (I can type
an address and then !map to go directly to the map for that address, for
example, or a term and then !img to go to an image search for that term). I
think of DDG more as a command line than a search engine.

The search results are generally pretty adequate, too. If you search for a
simple term, you get relevant Wikipedia or IMDB results for that term, which
is often exactly what I want.

And if I feel like Google would be more relevant, I can just slap a !g on
there. I realize "ease of access to a competitor's product" is not a fantastic
selling point, but for me it's enough.

100% personal preference, obviously, but it works for me.

------
blantonl
I'm curious how this compares to the amount of searches on Google's platform.
1 billion searches in 2013 sounds like a huge number, but placing that into
context might be a better way to announce this.

~~~
femto113
It's about 4 hours worth of Google searches, according to this:
[http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-
searches/](http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/)

~~~
jusben1369
Holy smoke. That's depressing and fascinating all at once.

------
PhasmaFelis
One underappreciated advantage of DuckDuckGo is that it doesn't censor results
as Google does, which is really useful for finding, e.g., torrent sites.

~~~
mdwrigh2
You mean it doesn't respect DMCA takedown notices? Because I bet it does.

~~~
venomsnake
Is DDG US Company?

~~~
higherpurpose
Yes. Startpage on the other hand is European, and so is Faroo.

~~~
magicalist
startpage is just a google proxy to anonymize it, though, so it's not like
they can add DCMAed results back in.

------
oh_teh_meows
just to provide some perspective, a quick google search (oops) informed me
that google sees 5.9 billion searches a day (about 2.16 trillion searches in
2013). Before the Snowden revelation, DDG enjoyed a slow but steady growth,
getting around 50 mil queries a month, and rapidly increased to over 100+ mil
after the leak.

[http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-
searches/](http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/)

[https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html](https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html)

------
interstitial
I was hoping for some snark, like: "Top search trends on DuckDuckGo for 2013:
We don't know, we don't track your searches!"

~~~
Spittie
They could, [https://duckduckgo.com/privacy](https://duckduckgo.com/privacy)

>We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we
do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings.

------
a3_nm
"One billion" sounds impressive but it should be compared to over two thousand
billion searches made on Google Search over the same period:
[http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-
searches/](http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/)

------
atmosx
DuckDuckGo is a Good search Engine for English-speaking countries. I'm
European (Greek) and whenever I need to search the Greek-web, which is quite
often, I found DDG result's lucking very _basic_ staff.

To give you an example, say the government passed a new law (which happens
every day), if I try searching at DuckDuckGo 9 out 10 I won't find anything
_closely related_. If I search Google the most prominent newspaper headlines
(along with notorious news-sites) pop-up and I find what I need.

I know that Google closely monitors my clicks (I own a Chromebook and Chrome
is my default browser everywhere) and shows me different results than other
users. But thing is, for non-English content it's too far ahead of the
competition for the time being.

------
nazgulnarsil
For anyone reading this who doesn't know (because i didn't until someone
explained and linked me) bang notation is amazing.
[https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html](https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html)

------
pirateking
I have been using DDG as my starting point for all desktop searches since
2011. I use Safari as my main browser and use the hosts file method to set DDG
as my default search[1]. I wish iOS had an option for similar.

Using DDG started off awkward, but the bang syntax is muscle memory now. I
would say my breakdown of providers is as follows: !g: 50%, !w: 30%, !gi: 10%,
!az: 5%, !yelp: 5%

I never use DDG directly.

[1] [https://duck.co/help/desktop/hosts-
file](https://duck.co/help/desktop/hosts-file)

~~~
1457389
Doesn't using the bang syntax invalidate any privacy or surveillance related
reasons to use DDG?

~~~
pirateking
Definitely. It is just a handy multiplexer - I have a habit at this point to
append every query with a bang.

On the occasions I forget, the DDG results seem to be improving. However, ~90%
of my Google queries are computer related, and DDG (and even the !so bang) are
not as relevant as Google yet for me. As soon as this use case improves
enough, I will break my bang habit and use DDG directly for most of my
queries.

------
anigbrowl
1,000,000,000 /365 = ~3m/day; Alexa suggests 5.6 pageviews/user so ~600k
unique users.

~~~
pavs
alexa is the least reliable source for any type of metrics whatsoever.

~~~
anigbrowl
It's just a guesstimate. 5 views/user/day seems like a reasonable mean for a
search engine.

------
jimmytidey
I was looking a JS library I'd seen mentioned on here, and couldn't find it
with Duck Duck Go. Was about to start posting / tweeting asking if anyone knew
where it was, but thought I'd try Google first. This library came up first
result. I'd have looked like a dick if I hadn't tried Google first - "Google
is your Friend" is powerfully socially enforced.

Now I use DDG mostly with the !g...

------
ilaksh
I'm pretty sure most DuckDuckGo searches go straight to Bing.

------
jeffbr13
I'm just gonna say that by far the best features, for me, are the "Goodies"
(had to look that up[1]) which let you query other services through the same
interface.

For example, `!wa ...` will query Wolfram Alpha, `!m {location}` will give me
a map, `!w ...` will search Wikipedia, and `!g ...` will redirect me to a
google search if DDG's results aren't comprehensive enough.

For 90% of my queries, DuckDuckGo gives me exactly what I need, or enough data
to drill down and make a more effective query. And, more importantly, __it
provides a single interface to all other major search engines __, making it a
hell of a start page to have[2].

[1]: [https://duckduckgo.com/goodies](https://duckduckgo.com/goodies) [2]:
[https://duckduckgo.com/](https://duckduckgo.com/)

~~~
Semaphor
90%? Wow. It's less for me. But still, they got better, I now usually (60-70%
I guess) get a result I want on the first page (compared to google where there
are several useful results on the first page) and that together with the
!keywords is enough for me. Now the only thing left I need to replace is
google calendar and I'll be google free :)

------
_RPM
Interesting fact: [http://duck.com](http://duck.com) redirects to Google.com

~~~
dredmorbius
And was registered in 1995. Though WHOIS doesn't return the full registration
transfer history. We don't know who's owned it over the interim.

------
buckbova
Switched to DuckDuckGo for searches from the desktop a year ago. Just to give
someone else a chance.

~~~
drakaal
If you are giving chances try
[http://www.plexisearch.com/](http://www.plexisearch.com/)

------
navs
I know this is a silly nitpick but I do wish DuckDuckGo had a simpler URL.
It's so quick and easy to type in bing, google and even blekko. How's about
some variation on DDG?

That aside, I especially love DDG's Goodies:
[https://duckduckgo.com/goodies](https://duckduckgo.com/goodies)

I use it for simple password generation, lorem ipsum text, color code
conversion, etc. I know Google has its extras but I don't believe it comes
close to DDG's goodies offering

~~~
zck
ddg.gg redirects to [https://duckduckgo.com/](https://duckduckgo.com/) .

~~~
Aldo_MX
Somehow I found duck.co easier to remember

------
drakaal
We don't track searches,at
[http://www.plexisearch.com/](http://www.plexisearch.com/)

And we don't have ads, so there is that too.

We want to make search better. Not out of the goodness of our heart, but
because we figure if we do a good job someone will buy us, and then we will
get paid, and the bad guys at Google or Bing will at least offer you better
results when they are being creepy. That's what it is all about right?

We are about 1% the size of DDG.

~~~
dclara
I like the idea: "don't track searches".

I've visited your search engine. Looks like you call Bing's API to get the
result. The catch is: you don't get the images back since Bing does not have
them either.

So why shall I just use Bing instead? Perhaps you are stronger in the "News"
search?

~~~
drakaal
If you do a search we have never done you get bing. If you do a popular
search, or the same search 30 seconds later you get better results.

------
tiatia
I tried GGG but I prefer ixquick.com or startpage.com

------
unlimit
I have been using DDG for sometime in my office, in fact DDG is my default in
firefox. I don't miss google. DDG finds me whatever I need.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Does anyone know the numbers from last year?

~~~
aidos
They have their data up here
[https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html](https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html)

------
ozh
Quick tip that's cool with DDG: just type in the URL bar something like
"ddg.gg/things you are looking for" (providing that as soon as you type "dd"
your browser will most likely auto expand it to "ddg.gg/", you need very few
keystrokes)

------
josephlord
I use it in Firefox on the computer and only occasionally use Google. I raised
a bug with Apple to request the ability to set it on mobile Safari. At the
moment you can only use Google or Bing (or Yahoo-Bing)

File duplicates if you want it as Apple counts dupes as up votes.

------
k-mcgrady
I'd be interested to know what browser is most popular with DDG users. Are
people who use it because of privacy concerns with Google still using Chrome?
Or other Google products?

------
higherpurpose
By the way for people who really care about privacy, there's Epic Browser,
which has some anti-tracking stuff built-in, and is based on Chromium:

[http://www.epicbrowser.com/](http://www.epicbrowser.com/)

I wish they'd allow people to change the Omnibox search engine, though, or
offer DDG and Startpage as options, especially if they can partner up with
them and take a cut of revenue, but I guess it's not a huge deal breaker.

~~~
dublinben
People who really care about privacy are using Tor Browser.

------
seeingfurther
the best thing DDG could do is to simulate Google's UI as much as possible
without getting sued. Think about it.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Google UI today or Google UI a couple of years ago?

Current Google UI features every block with different margin and content which
is neither trivial nor worthwhile to copy.

------
linux_devil
And I did hundreds of them.

