
DuckDuckGo is blowing up - MatthewPhillips
http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
======
epi0Bauqu
Thank you all! (I'm the founder.)

In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things
we're working on are better programming queries
(<https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html> \-- one of my new favorites
<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa>) and speed.

For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should
significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to know if anyone
has noticed any difference over the past day or so. This change should
equalize a lot of the location differences, which is the main issue. In some
parts of the world we were way slower.

Also, for anyone wanting to get involved we've been open sourcing more and
more (<https://github.com/duckduckgo>). We're working on better entry points,
but one could start here now: <https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki>.
For programming documentation in particular, this is the repo:
<https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead>. That will answer
queries like <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl+split>

On the back-end we could also use some sysadmin help :). Here's our hiring
info: <http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216387>

Of course, we're also always looking for feedback, the more detailed/specific
the better: <https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html>

~~~
memset
Way cool. Going to try using this as my default search engine for a while.

I really really like the "alternative to" feature. What could I do to help you
get better at alternatives which are not as popular? (eg, "alternative to
cheetahmail" or "alternative to grubhub" or "alternative to xkcd"?)

Also, what kind of feedback would you need to help improve the tech-related
searches? Like "ebcdic table" or "1010 in hex"?

~~~
rpicard
The alternatives are pulled from <http://alternativeto.net> so adding to their
site will add to the zero-click info.

You can contribute to tech-related searches by contributing to the open source
zero-click info (see this tutorial
[https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/Open-Source-
Pl...](https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/Open-Source-Plugin-
Tutorial)).

You can also send in ideas here:
<https://duckduckgo.uservoice.com/forums/5168-plugins>.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Obligatory meta-comment:

<http://alternativeto.net/software/alternativeto/>

------
geoffw8
Wow, thats a great curve. Just wanted to throw in my personal experience with
DuckDuckGo, and it doesn't necessarily reflect on DuckDuckGo specifically,
however:

After seeing them pop up here once or twice quite recently I thought I'd give
it a go, I opened up preferences in Chrome and switched my default search over
to DDG. It felt good, made a nice change but was certainly a bit "odd". I
found what I wanted, most of the time albeit it with a slight drop in quality
vs Google.

But my biggest gripe with them was confidence. I'd just started out at a new
job as a programmer and as you can imagine, I was searching for a good few
things, usually things I was struggling with and I just didn't feel sure that
I was getting the best results I possibly could be. You might think thats
totally crazy, but when your battling an issue as many of you know, you want
more than anything to work out whats going on. I didn't have any margin for
error, I wanted the best results right there that second.

Specifics aside, knowing that Google is far superior in their results makes it
real difficult to use another search engine really, extra features (!so etc)
or no extra features. I personally search because I need to "find" something
and I usually don't know where that something is, opening up Stack Overflow
isn't that much of a chore for me. Its the _other_ bit I need help with.

Anyway, I commend their mission and hope they succeed in taking a fair slice
of the market. I think he's a great entrepreneur and I wish him the best of
luck. I can't imagine what it must be like to be head on with... Google.

~~~
pushingbits
I find that I am slowly losing confidence in Google. What I often do is input
searches in the form: "general term", "specific term", then click on a link
and immediately do a find for the specific term I searched for. In the last
few months, the specific term I searched for often does not exist on the
linked site at all, which I find quite annoying.

I tried bing a couple of times, but the results are even worse.

Maybe Google verbatim mode will fix the problem? I've set up a quick search
recently, but have yet to start using it.

~~~
moultano
Would love to see some example queries to debug if you have them handy. (You
can check your search history <https://www.google.com/history/> to jog your
memory if you have it turned on.)

~~~
pushingbits
Here's one: python list popleft

Third result is: <http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html>

6th result is: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4426663/how-do-i-
remove-t...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4426663/how-do-i-remove-the-
first-item-from-a-python-list)

Neither one of those contains "popleft".

~~~
smallblacksun
Try putting quotes around popleft in your query. That works in this case to
get rid of the results that don't specifically include the word.

~~~
zxer
In this case it does, but very often doesn't. It seems to me that this happens
mostly with rapidly changing websites, as if the cache showed a somewhat later
state than when it was indexed.

And this has been an annoyance since years.

------
stroboskop
DuckDuckGo is definitely pulling users from Google. By mimicking Facebook,
Google has lost its mojo. Stepped right into the "social" honeypot. No news.
The more interesting thing is the fantastic feeling more and more people have:
that Facebook and Google will take eachother down the spiral.

As for the Google part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction,
but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Especially if DuckDuckGo and other
engines continue to get better while practicing their principles instead of a
crude mixture of addictive search quality, addictedness to bucks and PR along
the lines of "Don't be evil".

~~~
coderdude
[1998]

Google is definitely pulling users from Yahoo. By mimicking Alta Vista, Yahoo
has lost its mojo. Stepped right into the "portal" honeypot. No news. The more
interesting thing is the fantastic feeling more and more people have: that
Alta Vista and Yahoo will take eachother down the spiral.

As for the Yahoo part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction,
but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Especially if Google and other
engines continue to get better while practicing their principles instead of a
crude mixture of addictive search quality, addictedness to bucks and PR along
the lines of "Yahhooooo!".

~~~
true_religion
One difference in this story is....

Google was vertically integrated from the start: They sent out their own bots
to scan the internet, they had their own reverse index, and created their own
algorithm.

I'm not sure about DDGs backend---but if people use the g! tag, its almost as
if DDG is simple chrome for Google.

Maybe that'll be the future: Google will become the maker of engines, and let
everyone else make the car.

~~~
FreeFull
As far as I know, DDG uses both data from other search engines (Google, Bing)
as well as its own crawling bots. If they only used their own crawlers, with
the current size of the internet it would take a long time for them to get a
good amount of data.

------
mrspeaker
!g is the google killer. I switched to DDG, but kept drifting back to see if
Google was doing better. I find myself using !g less and less, as I get used
to the result format.

At the moment, DDG reminds me of Firefox (or was it WaterSquirrel then?) back-
in-the-day. Its something that "feels" better than what is the standard - and
it's something that I go on and on about to other nerds, when I'm drunk ;)

~~~
phlyingpenguin
I hate this (!g) though.

If I want Google results, it's a heck of a lot faster, easier, and natural to
just Google it instead of adding some kind of search operator BS to my query.
I used DDG for a while (a long time ago, admittedly) and basically had to !g
every query I ran in order to get acceptable results. In the end, I gave up
because it was just adding typing and thinking time to search.

I suppose one could argue that the interface lacks some of the annoyances of
Google, but I feel like quality and speed are the most desirable traits of a
search engine (in that order). If we're just using somebody else's results
anyway then why should we accept a slowdown?

~~~
glesica
I like the !bang operators because I can get results from Google for specialty
searches like maps (!m) and images (!i) right from the address bar in Chrome,
but still keep DDG as my primary search engine. Google's results _are_
slightly better, but it hasn't been a big deal for me. I still end up finding
what I am looking for.

------
spodek
People care about privacy and not being tracked. I predict Google's arms race
with Facebook to profit more from user's data will augment this growth. And/or
dampen that arms race.

That's why I search with DuckDuckGo by default (previously Scroogle).

~~~
jackery
With everyone's concern with privacy, I'm surprised Ask Eraser isn't mentioned
more frequently (<http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/about/askeraser.shtml>).

~~~
chaostheory
I used to use Ask until they made an announcement that they were leaving the
search business and staying in the toolbar sector. I'm surprised they're still
up.

------
mise
I certainly felt some difficulty first in setting Duck Duck Go as my default
search engine. Google trains you repeatedly, implicitly, over the years on how
to optimise your query for Google. I often still find myself adding "!g" to my
DDG query to perform the search on Google, but at least Google isn't my first
point of contact any more.

------
jimmyjim
I've gotta say, Gabriel's tenacity is both admirable and inspirational. I
remember long ago in its early days I tried it and shrugged it off as just
another search engine, destined for failure after a few months of obscurity
and being largely unknown.

It's now my default browser, and has been as of about 2 weeks ago. Gabriel has
been very keen on picking up where other search site are slacking.

------
cromwellian
DDG:
[http://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+movie+where+evil+is+in+a+toaste...](http://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+movie+where+evil+is+in+a+toaster+oven)

Time Bandits is #8

vs
[https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=the+mo...](https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=the+movie+where+evil+is+in+a+toaster+oven)

First hit.

I realize it is in fashion to make bold claims that somehow Google destroyed
its search in a monomaniacal pursuit of social, but a hyperbolic if not
patently untrue story. Yes, the user interface has changed and gotten fancier
and more cluttered with the introduction of toolbar and sidebar (that's been
happening over years, prior to G+), but the actual organic results have not
changed much at all except to improve on average, even if you take into
account Search Plus Your World (which you can disable)

Shocking, but most people at Google do not work on G+, it is not the sole
focus of the company, and the narrative that Google is simply dropping
everything else to mindlessly chase Facebook is blogosphere fiction. There are
over 30,000 employees and I would be surprised if even 2% of them worked on
G+. Teams at Google are typically small and at any given time, people are
working on a large number of projects. It's simply not Google's culture to
mindlessly focus on a single unproven product to the detriment of others. If
anything, Google is frequently criticized for doing too many new things at
once, and that's what you get when you have a company run with engineering
culture.

Google makes most of their money from Search and Ads. You can bet that they
watch data from search quality and marketshare like a hawk, and if social was
causing Google search to suck more and lose customers, you can bet they'd turn
it off in a heartbeat. It's been said by some analysts that every 1% loss in
search marketshare is $1 billion in revenue. Facebook isn't making that much
money, and so from a cost-benefit analysis, sacrificing billions in search
share revenue to try and gain social-search revenue doesn't sound rational.

It would thus be reasonable to assume, that any changes Google actually makes
to core search are a) conservative b) subjected to a battery of scientific
tests and c) as low risk as they can make them to their core business.

But the way you read things in the Blogosphere, Search has been radically
altered. The evidence just isn't there.

~~~
krelian
It's very common these days to take many amazing products for granted. Google
search is an amazing tool that suffers a lot from very vocal complaints and
not enough praise. The only areas it is lacking in are those that are heavily
targeted by spammers.

------
pasbesoin
One of National Public Radio's (NPR) shows -- "On the Media", perhaps -- had a
several minute segment on Google's privacy changes and someone who decided to
"divorce" themselves from Google. They mentioned DDG as the search engine
they'd switched to and commented favorably on the experience.

That's at least the second time in recent weeks that I've heard DDG mentioned
on national or state public radio.

It might sound... "incidental", but those kinds of exposures really get "the
masses" to go and have a look.

EDIT: Here's a reference to the "divorce" segment:

<http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/mar/23/divorcing-google/>

------
citricsquid
I don't much like DuckDuckGo's results. For example a search for "Minecraft"
via DuckDuckGo produces:

#1 minecraft.net (official site) #2 facebook.com/minecraft #3
joystiq.com/game/minecraft (news blog) #4 minecraftportal.com (minecraft blog)
#5 minecraft.en.softonic.com (a site distributing a copy of the phased out
minecraft trial version) #6 minecraftwiki.net (official Minecraft wiki) #7
kotaku.com/minecraft/ (blog)

The #1 result makes sense and is great, but why are the rest of the top
results all blogs (besides the wiki)? It seems to heavily favour blogs. The
official Minecraft forum isn't even in the top 20...

~~~
xemoka
I'm not exactly sure what your talking about. The results for Google's
minecraft search are pretty crummy too.

#1 minecraft.net (can't tell from the search results if it's even the games
real website, since there are ~.com, ~.net and ~.org sites all run by others)
#2 minecraftforfree.com (a site distributing the full version for free?!) #3
minecraftwiki #4 wikipedia's article #5 pocket edition on the android app
store, not even the actual website and no links to the iOS version? #6-10
youtube videos of people playing or reviewing minecraft #11 3 news links about
minecraft #12-13 both link to googlemapsmania articles on minecraft maps.

Oh and a nice link at the bottom about DMCA requested removal of a link (sent
by Mojang at least). I imagine due to copyright/IP violations like link #2.

YMMV though due to Google's search personalisation...

The minecraft forum isn't listed until the second link on page 2. I'm not sure
if you missed it but the forum is link #10 on the DDG search...

~~~
citricsquid
It was definitely ~#20 when I checked, it was below the page (I had to scroll
then ctrl + f to make sure I found it) but now I can't even find it any more,
the only thing I can find is "minecraftnews.net" which is around #30 and is a
rip off of our site.

Here is a screenshot of the results I see: <http://i.imgur.com/qIc1J.png>

I've visited google from a VM that has never used google before and I see:

#1 minecraft.net #2 minecraftwiki.net #3 wikipedia.org/wiki/minecraft #4
Minecraft fan made trailer (video with ~8m views) #5 minecraft.org (fansite)
#6 minecraftforum.net #7 Minecraft android app (official version of the game
for android) #8 Minecraft on Facebook #9 IGN Minecraft review #10
Minecraft.com (a site capitalising on the domain but offering no Minecraft
content)

Google is certainly not perfect but they are a mile better than DuckDuckGo,
which does not even include the official Minecraft forum which is linked from
the wiki, from the official Minecraft site, from almost every Minecraft
Youtube video...

Wait I just did more "investigation", DuckDuckGo cares about capitalisation.
What the hell? "Minecraft" and "minecraft" have different results and even the
pages differ. Sometimes I can find minecraftforum.net listed for "Minecraft"
(but not minecraft) and sometimes it just doesn't show at all. That's on
typing in my search and refreshing; seconds apart and the results change.

------
TeeWEE
I use duckduckgo as my default search engine now. If i need some more info i
just use g!. Really like the bang syntax!

And its doesnt track all my stuff, and this stupid google+ (failure) is not
integrated. I just want to search stuff. Google did it right in the past, now
duck duck go is my uberlord.

------
Gobitron
That's a fantastic looking curve, but keep in mind the absolute numbers shown.
They are at 1.6 million direct queries per day. Still a ways to go to be truly
competitive (3 billion per day for Google). Still, if they keep up with
current growth rates, they could do some real damage.

~~~
joshmlewis
Just one at a time is all it takes. :) Replace starfish with searches..and
bend your imagination a bit.

"A man was walking along a deserted beach at sunset. As he walked he could see
a young boy in the distance, as he drew nearer he noticed that the boy kept
bending down, picking something up and throwing it into the water. Time and
again he kept hurling things into the ocean.

As the man approached even closer, he was able to see that the boy was picking
up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at a time he was
throwing them back into the water.

The man asked the boy what he was doing, the boy replied,"I am throwing these
washed up starfish back into the ocean, or else they will die through lack of
oxygen. "But", said the man, "You can't possibly save them all, there are
thousands on this beach, and this must be happening on hundreds of beaches
along the coast. You can't possibly make a difference." The boy looked down,
frowning for a moment; then bent down to pick up another starfish, smiling as
he threw it back into the sea. He replied,

"I made a huge difference to that one!""

------
wraith4000
I swapped to DDG on all of my browsers about a month ago and I've been really
pleased. Like others, I find myself occasionally using !g, particularly for
programming queries. Things like !so, !mdn and !msdn actually help out a lot
in some of these cases, which makes me think that as I learn the bangs I'll
rely on Google less and less.

------
reginaldo
pg's analysis was spot on, then [1]. I recently realized DuckDuckGo would be a
hit when a hacker friend who does not read HN started using DDG as his primary
search engine.

To me, this means it is out there. I switched too, at least for a while, and
now I use both google and DDG, constantly having the impression that DDG's
results are getting better and better.

[1] <http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html>

~~~
anthuswilliams
I remember specifically thinking of DDG when PG mentioned search engines in
that keynote. I've used DDG since 2010 and I would never switch back.

~~~
marcamillion
Although I don't use DDG, I too thought of them specifically when PG mentioned
it.

Let's see if PG turns out to be right on this one.

------
ekalvi
That's consistent with our Google Analytics. Visits from DDG are up to 58 last
week, up from 15 the first week in January with a steady climb. There was a
dip last week over week for some reason.

Compared to Google's 38K visits for last week, they have a long way to go to
make a dent. We perform better in DDG results, as well.

------
jzycrzy
I've been using DuckDuckGo more and more lately since google added a
redirect[1] for any link clicked in their search results a couple months ago.

I'm in China and most links I click on google don't load. Perhaps because
China is messing with DNS queries to google.com and trying to limit the amount
of data they collect on their citizens.

[1] The google link for duckduckgo search result first hits this link, and
this is where the pageload errors occur:
[http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...</a>

------
Zirro
I've been using DDG for quite a few months now and in general it works well.
However I still find myself adding that "!g" at times when they find no
results, and seeing what I was looking for at Google. I am also a bit
disappointed with the "I'm feeling ducky"-results which are rarely what a
person is likely to be looking for as soon as you get more complex than one
word.

But that's the negative parts, and otherwise the positive outweighs those by
far. I love the bang-syntax and I found myself using their information-box
directly on the search page very often, mostly for converting currency.

I think better results will come with time and increasing usage, and I wish
them good luck in the future.

------
PaulHoule
if i get that right, people are doing a lot more API calls than direct
searches... Which begs the questions of (i) who they are, (ii) what they're
doing, and (iii) how this can be monetized?

~~~
muyuu
The graph is for direct searches though. You can see API calls stable at
around 9M for quite a while, and direct searches have sky-rocketed.

You're right that there are a lot more API calls still (~x6). But the gap is
closing quickly.

------
MitziMoto
I just wish DDG could implement autocomplete/search suggestions. It's probably
silly, but I've become as accustomed to typing a few letters into Google and
it knowing exactly what I'm looking for as I have to tab complete in a unix
terminal.

I've also really become accustomed to "instant" search. And I'll be the first
to admit I thought was a total gimmick when it was announced.

Edit: After reading what I wrote, I realized it came off as if I didn't like
DDG or didn't use it. Neither of those are true. I really like DDG and use it
fairly often.

------
rbarooah
Nice. If nothing else this proves that there is unmet demand in search.

~~~
uriloran
It was mentioned before, but I think it's more a kind of "different" and
unpersonalized search. Like proposed by Paul Graham:
<http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html>

~~~
rbarooah
I agree. My point is simply that this is strong evidence that Google's 'one
size fits all' approach leaves room for other entrants.

------
xpose2000
It's great to hear that DDG is doing well. The problem is that I will never
switch over to it due to its shortcomings compared to Google and even Bing. I
tried to give it a go for a day or so, but quickly realized the results being
returned were not good enough.

1) It's not as accurate as Google. Sometimes DDG might return a better result
(such as <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa>), but 9/10 times
Google is much more accurate.

2) DDG is playing catchup to a search engine that has hundreds of employees
and a 10+ year head start. The types of queries DDG is trying to solve now
were likely solved years ago and have been finely tuned numerous times.

3) I think this good video [http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-
search-qualit...](http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-
quality-meeting-uncut.html) about sums up the type of problems they are
solving now and how advanced their platform is. Google is tweaking an edge-
case scenario that is only .1% of their traffic. That is more traffic than all
of DDG.

4) If DDG is all about respecting privacy and not tracking users, then use
Google or Bing in incognito mode. Problem solved.

I'm not trying to be negative, but all signs point to a losing battle.

~~~
jlarocco
As a counterexample for number one, I've found DDG to be as good or better
than Google on almost everything. The only place Google really beats it is in
mailing list archives. DDG doesn't seem to crawl sites like gmane.

Numbers two and three don't make any sense to me as reasons not to use DDG.
Using those criteria nobody would have switched to Google because they were
just some college guys, while AltaVista and Yahoo have a big head start and
huge departments working on search...

Number four is simply too inconvenient. I could go through the trouble of
switching to incognito mode every time I needed to search, or I could just use
DDG.

~~~
xpose2000
The difference now is that Google is constantly trying to improve now more
than ever, whereas before the search engines thought it was "good enough".
AltaVista and Yahoo were stuck in the technology of the day. The guys at
Google had a crazy idea to implement "pagerank" and turn everything upside
down.

I switched to Google because it was more accurate, and for no reason other
than that. That's my #1 priority.

Fast forward to today and DDG is not trying to solve an accuracy or crawling
problem. I'm not really sure what problem they are trying to solve other than
to be an alternative search. There is nothing wrong with that, but I just
don't think it fits me.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
They are trying to solve the same problems, just coming at it from different
angles.

Google has given up on providing accurate search results to the anonymous
user. They now believe that customization is the way forward (Global Warming
results depending on your political leaning, etc.).

One aspect where Google's size is really killing it: _they should be
manipulating results manually_. For example, a JavaScript search should return
MDN in the top 5 results and W3Schools not at all. That doesn't happen, I
believe because Google can't manually do stuff like this because of the fact
that they compete in many different markets. That's the advantage of only
being a search engine; a search engine's job is to be biased.

------
pnathan
I use DDG a lot.

The reality is, it's not as tuned a search engine as Google is. However, I
find it to be a more serendipitous search engine. It's better in breadth than
G, IMO. That is to say, the top hit on Google is more precise if I want a
specific thing, but the breadth of results on DDG is much more useful than
Google in general.

As a matter of fact, it reminds me of the '90s, where a search could teach you
more than just the one thing you were looking for.

I like it... most of the time. :-)

------
Darraghb
Great to see DDG gaining traction.

However, I switched my Chrome search to DDG last year and the one thing that I
realised I couldn't live without was maps.

I didn't realise how often I must search for an address and to have location
appear in search makes life so much easier.

If you guys integrated with Openstreetmap, I'd switch back in an instant!

~~~
GFischer
I'm a heavy Google Maps user as well.

OSM integration would be nice, but I've found that DDG still has slightly
inferior results to Google.

I do like the approach to privacy and occasionaly use it :)

------
ph33r
Last week I was searching for a: Sabian 18" HHX Chinese cymbal. I was
considering buying one for my kit and wanted to see some reviews, video
samples, prices etc.

DuckDuckGo: The top there results were American Ebay search results (I live in
Canada), a drum shop in Memphis (15 hour drive), and various other online
stores (discountdrumequipment.info).

Google: The first page of results had links to the official Sabian product
pages, Youtube videos of people playing it, and the most impressive thing was
a 3 day old Kijiji ad (again, I live in Canada) with the exact cymbal I wanted
for a good price in a city just 45 minutes from me.

I responded to the ad, drove the 45 minutes, and purchased it. DuckDuckGo's
stance on user privacy is admirable, but Google still gets my vote... it's
accuracy still impresses me.

------
JoelMcCracken
I recently switched to using ddg for all of my searches.

So far, I have been happy. I normally find what I am looking for within the
first few results, and I find myself using !g less frequently.

ddg certainly feels faster and less irritating than google. I have been very
satisfied.

------
whackberry
Hi, I've only been using DuckDuckGo lately and I love it. Search quality is so
impressive and the respect for privacy is very welcome. I hope it is able to
maintain this independent feel and not sell out like others did.

------
sreyaNotfilc
Awesome. I've heard of duckduckgo from a coworker and use it regularly.

I'm creating an art site and have a search feature. I made sure to include
duckduckgo along with google, and bing as search providers. It only makes
sense, right?

------
tete
The only thing that's missing from DDG taking over the world is good i18n.
Really, it's the only thing that ever made it impossible for me to recommend
it. A lot of especially older people outside the US use Google mainly because
they don't or can't care for the rest of the world and simply don't have the
required English skills.

This isn't just about the interface language and search results, but also
about !bangs. To be useable !ebay has to use the the already available region
setting.

Other than that I have been an advocate from the early days, because DDG is
what the world needs.

------
thecombjelly
I don't really understand why so many people think that the results on DDG are
worse than Google. Maybe I just don't search for things that other people do,
or I search differently, but for me, I usually prefer the DDG results. Most of
it has to do with the zero click info and the disambiguation. Especially the
disambiguation. I get better results because most things I search for could be
disambiguated, and I take full advantage of that to quickly give me just the
results related to what I'm looking for.

------
phreeza
Incidentally, I switched my default search to ddg 2 days ago. Use !g a lot but
also ddg native frequently. Starting to get a feel for what type of search
will benefit more from DDGs extras.

------
reitzensteinm
Related discussion on the previous thread here, about a month ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3661345>

------
orta
It's interesting to see how many requests are coming from the API, offhand I
can't think of any uses that I've come into contact with. Does anyone know who
is using the API?

~~~
prakash
Fastestfox, Cyberspace and others use our API:
<http://duckduckgo.com/api.html>

------
shaggy
It's very exciting to see usage of DDG increasing and the service getting more
and more recognition. I've been using DDG for almost two years now and love
the service. The privacy is what drew me in, but the goodies are what made me
a user for life. It's the default for my browser and I use the iPhone and iPad
apps regularly. Keep up the good work DDG! I'd be happy to lend my sysadmin
skills to help :)

------
rubberpants
I've been using blekko.com and found that I prefer it to ddg. Like others
have, I too go back to Google for programming related searches at times.

------
akavlie
I tried to switch to DDG recently; after a couple of weeks using it as my
default search engine in Chrome, I had to switch back to Google.

Speed was a pretty big factor, but more than that, the search results just
didn't compare. Still, I'm rooting for them, and hope that they're able to
close the gap, both in speed and results. I love their style, and all of the
site-specific search shortcuts.

------
kirillzubovsky
Did you know Duck.com redirects to Google.com? That's pretty smart of Google.
In other thoughts, congratulations on the exploding growth!

------
dusklight
I just want to say I use duckduckgo, but the reason is because I find Google's
recent policies to be unsupportable and I no longer want to use them. So far
duckduckgo has been inferior in just about every way to google, most notably
search speed and search quality. Also I have seen some extremely dubious
scammy ads in ddg, which make me uncomfortable for sure.

------
fotonobile
You are #1 for programming related queries. I am curious about seeing you
build up the similar precision/recall for other areas.

------
nullflux
The thing that worries me about DDG is their reliance on others' search
engines.

If there was ever a true defection from one of the big guys' services to DDG
(i.e., if DDG was _actually_ blowing up), it seems to me they'd just replicate
many of DDG's features for their userbase and DDG would wither, or even just
pull DDG's access to their search engines.

------
calncal
Nice curve.

March 1st caused me to go from DDG dabbler to browser default.

Still use !g, but I find that I recommend DDG more often than I use !g.

------
zmmmmm
Have been using DDG for the last 2 months but have to admit I'm feeling
withdrawal symptoms, mainly due to speed. I hope that the increase in traffic
is mainly responsible for things being a bit slow - the sluggishness (NOT
results) is the primary thing making me yearn for Google at the moment.

------
mladenkovacevic
Pretty damn good. I love how the search engine itself helps you find a better
context to frame your search into. It's like having a conversation with the
website (instead of it assuming I want something because I searched for it
before and it's "most likely" I was looking for this)

------
buro9
Does anyone know how much of that comes from Linux Mint?

I dabbled with DDG a few times, but only when I changed to Mint did I start
using it frequently. I've since wondered how much of a proportion of the
traffic of DDG is because it's now the default search engine for Firefox in
Mint.

------
joeblau
I've been using this search engine for a week and I really like it. The only
thing I've noticed is that Google has conditioned me to never look at the top
section because that's where sponsored ad's are so I have to force myself to
click on the top link.

Brainwashed by GOOG :)

------
nextstep
I love DuckDuckGo. My only real complaint is when their search falls back on
Google (for maps, and things like that). It would be great if DDG were able to
start providing their own alternative image/map searches. I would probably
switch to them fulltime.

------
dr_
As with most new search startups, people will give it a chance. Hence the
increase in traffic. I tried it a couple of times but, as most people do, I
then checked Google just to make sure I'd really covered what is considered
the full spectrum of search.

~~~
prakash
!g "search query" on DDG will do the search on google.

Entire list here: <http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html>

------
duncanj
Give me a quick (or configurable, or special URL) that includes a "search on
Google Scholar" link and I will switch from Google. Ever since Google's visual
refresh that removed the menu item for search on google scholar, I've lost one
of my timesavers.

------
buster
For everyone finding DDG to slow, my last recommendation on this one..
startpage.com :)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3662475>

(just to make people aware of alternatives, before returning to
google/bing/etc)

------
snowpolar
I feel part of it's sudden huge growth has to do with udacity search engine
course.

------
wastedbrains
Hooray I like DDG and switched awhile ago making it my default search.
Congrats.

------
tomelders
I've tried hacking the Safari Binary using the online instructions to make DDG
my default search (GLIMS sucks), but I can't get it working at all. I can't
find the lines that I'm meant to be replacing.

Has anyone else had any luck?

------
nl
_Wed 28-Mar-2012 1,518,581 direct 9,580,029 api 225,161 bot_

Am I reading this right? DDG does ~6 times as much traffic in API requests
compared to search requests?

That makes a pretty significant difference to the monetisation strategy!

~~~
jeltz
Note though that the growth of direct requests is much faster than the growth
of API requests.

------
JamesNapJr
That's awesome! Just goes to show that search is still an area for growth.

------
tswartz
Yes, I've noticed an increase in speed over the last couple of days.

Keep up the good work!

------
radge
I really wish I could use DDG on iOS then I could fully replace google.

------
codesuela
as a happy DDG user I have to say congrats and I absolutely love the zero
click box, a feature that often provides superior search quality than Google.

------
toomanysecrets
I love using DDG through the Tor network. <http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion>

------
leojg
I started to use it about a couple of weeks ago

------
tonfa
Do they publish revenue? I wonder what the infrastructure costs are and how
they scale in comparison to the number of request.

~~~
rplnt
I think that most of their results come from Bing if I remember correctly. So
the scaling doesn't have to be as heavy as it might seem. But I may be wrong.

------
pferde
Careful with the headline, I'm sure it caused some terrorist alert bells to
ring in som US three-letter agency. :)

------
thejteam
My kids like the cute picture of the duck.

------
roadnottaken
Nice to see such an important and modern project written in Perl, which people
around here shit on all the time.

------
ExxKA
Nice! You guys deserve it

------
eru
It would be nice to see those graphs with a logarithmic y-axis.

------
RLG_RLG
Thanks for this! I was finally fed up with goCIAoglNSAe.cFBIom

------
hm2k
Tip: Use the short URL ddg.gg for less typing.

------
asymmetric
congrats. i stopped using google after their last policy change. DDG mostly
fits the bill, apart from some special cases.

------
yuletide666
Chrome autocomplete support would be awesome.

------
jccodez
Glad to hear. Been using it more of late.

------
spot
So how is DuckDuckGo going to make money?

~~~
itsprofitbaron
It's already monetizing via ads specifically, sponsored links which are
highlighted in Yellow and are syndicated through Microsoft adCenter. They also
take affiliate commission on sites like Amazon and eBay.

------
shepbook
Long live the Hockey Stick!

------
nsomaru
hurry up and get some servers in India.

------
littlemerman
Congrats!

------
zbuc
I like the concept of DDG but unfortunately the results just aren't there
yet...

Look at the search results for "Google Verbatim Mode" on DDG vs Google.

On Google, all results are actually about the "Verbatim" search mode on
Google. We even get results like "How to set Verbatim mode as default on
Google Chrome" with actual instructions.

On DDG, we instead get a really crappy blog article as the first result, and
some unrelated junk about Google Earth DirectX and Windows 8. There's one
result that asks the question most people searching for that query would want
answered, "I would like to be able to use verbatim mode as standard".
However... it's a link to a newsgroup posting with no answers, unlike the
Google results which actually provided links to blog postings with the answer.

So, I'm going to use Verbatim mode on Google for now, now that I know how to
activate it by default... Let me know if you guys work these issues out, I'd
love to use DDG, but it's just not returning valuable results reliably yet.

------
Craiggybear
Treading carefully here ... I love DDG and find it yields far more useful
results than anything else.

Besides, I like not getting tracked all the time and I can switch off ads
without needing any extensions. That in my view is a very civilised set of
options and the rest of the Internet should follow by example.

------
FredBrach
I'm using DuckDuckGo since two days now as default _everything_ (since I've
read this thread) and my surprise is that I've not switch back to google yet.
Hey that's awesome since I'm not specially an early adopter statistically.
Btw, I particularly like the insight box.

------
wilfra
Google has been annoying me lately. I'm willing to give this a shot. Good luck
DDG. Resetting Chrome default search engine now.

------
mbtforshoes
<http://www.mbtforshoes.com/> good shoes

------
jstalin
I <3 DDG.

