

Duck Duck Go is blowing up again - MatthewPhillips
https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html?1

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TallGuyShort
I've tried DDG before on several occasions, but always got frustrated with the
quality of the search results and changed back. After PRISM, I started finding
Google's results less and less accurate, so I tried again. I now find that for
most of the searches I do, DDG results are letting me find what I need faster
than I can with Google... Kudos to them! I applaud both their technical
achievements and their principles.

~~~
educating
I'm glad you said this, because it was the reason I stopped also. I'll give it
another try at home.

However there are a lot of times at work where having search results relevant
to me is essential. Since DDG is all about not being the search bubble, to use
them all of the time, I'd have to change the way I worked to bookmark my
projects and search for my blog entries in the blog's search bar instead of
just using the omnibox in Chrome (that is using Google) for everything.

Reason #2 is that search advertising helps pay for the GMail service that I
rely on. I don't want to go back to my cable company's email accounts. Yuck.
Terrible spam filtering and much worse webmail UI.

But, I'd like to stop using Google as much as the next guy. I'm waaaay too
reliant, and I'd be surprised if the U.S. hasn't infiltrated their employee
ranks, along with other countries, for greater influence and access to data
than is even currently known by congress. Using Google is like living in a
whorehouse.

~~~
jaryd
With regards to your email: I recently switched from Google Apps (free tier)
to Fastmail.fm and the transition has been pretty seamless. The interface is
snappy and decent looking, and importing all of my gmail over IMAP worked
well. On the other hand, I now pay a yearly fee for my email. The fee is
fairly nominal (~$40/year for a mid-range account), and my money ensures that
Fastmail doesn't need to harvest my content to keep the lights on.

~~~
educating
Thanks for the advice, but I don't know that I'd place all my eggs in a basket
affected by the politics and distance of the Federated States of Micronesia.

That's the problem with domains these days. Yay we're using a Libyan domain
and whoops (remember- they took it offline
[http://readwrite.com/2011/02/20/what_happens_to_ly_domains_w...](http://readwrite.com/2011/02/20/what_happens_to_ly_domains_when_libya_shuts_down_t)).
io - British Indian Ocean Territory: same deal. People aren't thinking.

~~~
jaryd
Yeah I think that's a very valid point. Thanks for the link -- was an
interesting read :)

EDIT: Just as an aside, Fastmail is operated by Opera and runs on many domains
that they control. For example, their IMAP and SMTP servers are
messagingengine.com.

~~~
thezilch
So, a US Govt owned domain. Remember Lavabit? Your email host is not good
enough, unless it's, at least, your own. Then you have a whole host of new
problems.

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kmfrk
Speaking of which, I can't for the life of me unsubscribe from DDG, no matter
how many times I tell them to stop pestering me on the unsubscribe service.

Does anyone else have the same problem?

~~~
_zekiel
Have you tried the link at the bottom of the newsletter? Clicking it should
unsub you:
[http://flash.duckduckgo.com/e.js?remove_address=core@duckduc...](http://flash.duckduckgo.com/e.js?remove_address=core@duckduckgo.com)

If that doesn't work, please email inbound@duckduckgo.com

~~~
kmfrk
I have, but I'll try the lastter e-mail - thanks.

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redthrowaway
I hate to admit it, but Google's omniscience as regards my personal life makes
for some _really_ damned relevant SERPs.

I might be able to overlook that in order to guard my privacy, but I doubt my
mom would. I simply can't see _any_ Google competitor, let alone DDG,
providing more relevant results without invading my privacy and, by extension,
sharing everything about me with the USG. I wish it were otherwise, but I'm
unfortunately convinced that we lost this one for all but a dedicated few _a
la_ FSF.

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zenocon
Also switched to DDG for about 2 months, and more often than not had to
preface every search with !g

I really _want_ to like and use DDG, but....

~~~
fc2
I want to like it too but I don't think DDG results will ever be as good as
Google because of the no tracking thing. Google just has more context to
figure out what I actually mean with my query, and the more I use it the
smarter it'll become.

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skierscott
It's been my default search engine for a while. My observations:

1\. The bang syntax is rather convenient. I'm an Alfred user (Mac OSX), and I
can easily get nearly everywhere with !.

2\. The results are getting much better. I often search for something and
think "these results aren't good enough" and do !g for google. The top link on
google is the normally the second or third link on DDG.

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unknownian
Recently I learned that DDG donates a portion of profits to Trisquel
[http://trisquel.info/](http://trisquel.info/) (bottom of page) and probably
other projects. That's pretty cool.

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thejosh
Default search engine for gnome isn't it? Or is it something else?

~~~
ZoF
You are correct, they switched from google pretty recently

~~~
thejosh
Would it account for the major surge though?

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benblodgett
I think DDG would be a much more viable option if they owned ddg.com. The
reason I still use google is because it flows naturally on the keyboard. I use
search as a navigation method, and typing duckduckgo.com is annoying. I would
absolutely make the full switch if command + t + ddg.com + query returned what
I wanted.

The search results are good, I salute you for that, but it's just not
convenient so I still find myself at google. You are asking for a major
workflow change but not making it easy.

~~~
randartie
Well, if they do well enough they should buy go.com

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onethumb
And for some reason, Google Chrome (conspiracy theorists erupt!) thinks this
page isn't in English:
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/6vq7ubvff7x4g55/2013-09-...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/6vq7ubvff7x4g55/2013-09-12%20at%207.57%20PM.png)

~~~
signed0
No browser is going to even look at the X-DuckDuckGo-Locale header.

Edit: Crome doesn't do that for me.

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john2x
I used to use DDG as my primary search engine before, but after a while I
found that clicking on the search results takes a long time before the page
opens. It didn't happen with Google. Never understood why that was.

Just tried again today, and it seems alright now. I'll switch back and see.

~~~
Q4273j3b
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I assumed the lag was because DDG
doesn't let result pages know what search terms you used to find them, and was
sending you through some generic middle page to hide that info?

I think you're right about speed, though. DDG just keeps getting better.

Did you know if the mouse is hovering over a DDG result, you can press o to to
open it? And I think there's a way to navigate through results using only
keys... I forgot how though...

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rogerbinns
Sadly DDG does have some bugs. I reported this one a few weeks ago but nothing
ever happened. They keep adding a www. prefix to urls even when the original
site didn't have it.

For example look at
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apsw](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apsw) and look at
the 3rd result at Google Code (Python, my project). They make the result URL
be www.code.google.com but there is no www and clicking gives an error. They
seem to be second guessing if a www prefix is needed, usually guessing right,
and then getting it wrong. Having to edit the www back out of URLs is a pain.

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webwright
Searches per day seems less interesting than "number of people who use DDG
daily" (which might admittedly be challenging to know depending on how deeply
DDG goes down the privacy road). A little googling shows that people search
60+ times per day (i imagine DDG users search on the high side). So I'd guess
DDG has... 60-70k people using it as their primary search engine?

~~~
randartie
Aren't the 2 probably directly correlated in regards to percentage growth over
time (which is what I think they want to show)?

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shmerl
I miss a few things there such as filtering by date and image search. Also, in
some cases Google still produces better results. But I switched to DDG as a
default search engine in Firefox, and use Google as a fallback only once in a
while.

My only concern was that it takes away from Mozilla since they have a deal
with Google, but what can you do...

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anigbrowl
4m searches per day? They have some way to go before catching google's ~5
billion/day. [http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-
searches/](http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/)

DDG is a fine service but the hype about its traffic levels feels pretty
forced.

~~~
stephen_g
I think 800% larger traffic than what they had eighteen months ago is pretty
impressive. But since they're not as big as Google nobody should care?

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't. Doublign every six months is nothing to be embarrassed about but it's
not especially epic. Contrast, say, Vine - which grew about 4000% in the first
6 months of this year: [http://www.wired.com/business/2013/06/twitter-vine-
growth/](http://www.wired.com/business/2013/06/twitter-vine-growth/)

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dil8
I am pretty much using DDG for most searches, with Google now being the
exception. I did take a little while to get used too, but now it seems natural
to search using DDG.

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graeme
Is this the same blowup that happened a week or two ago?

I think this is great news. But the headline may be misleading, it made me
think there had been a third blowup.

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mililani
Oh wow, thank for reminding me to switch my default search engine back to Duck
Duck Go.

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cgman
Can you stop promoting you crappy search engine here. It returns junk results
and looks like Godzilla's poop.

~~~
thepicard
Can you whine some more?

