
Duck Duck Go Passed 1mm Searches Per Day - pors
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/02/duck-duck-go-passed-1mm-searches-per-day.html
======
heyitsnick
I wonder how many include the google !bang to go direct to google. I love DDG,
and have it as the default search on all my devices and browsers, but more
than 50% of the time I go directly to google with !g in the search, and
another 20% i guess i start at DDG but then add in !g when i find the results
inferior.

For many searches, google's results I find are better - a common issue I've
found it DDG's results are just too general for quite specific searches - .e.g
the top result is teh homepage of a brand when I search for something more
specific like "brand something something" (sorry i can't come up with a great
example right now).

I still use DDG as I can use the rest of the bang syntax to get to wikipedia
et al, and for certain things the results (e.g. code/technical) are clearly
superior to googles.

I hope DDG logs all the times I go to DDG, then add in !g, to get some great
analytics on when I found the search results lacking!

~~~
dredmorbius
Dittos.

For many years I pretty much laughed at Google-search wannabes. Now I really
want there to be a credible alternative.

I've set DDG as my preferred search. But I'm still !banging to Google at least
half the time.

Can haz moar betters releventz plz!

~~~
epi0Bauqu
We would appreciate any specific examples at
<https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html> \-- it's a great way to improve!

But higher level, !g roughly accounted for 1% of queries yesterday, which also
includes all the cases where we ran out of results and people clicked on our
Try google link.

~~~
heyitsnick
Here's a real example that just occurred. A Search for "jquery select visited
anchor" on DDG returns the jquery selectors docs first (okay match) and
jquery.com match second (useless). A search on google.com, the first 2 results
are SO answers that answer exactly my question.

My point isn't specifically you rank SO lower than it should imo (although i
do think this is the case) - its in general, for me, you return roots of
homepages or brands at hte top when the query is clearly looking for something
very specific.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
I'm not seeing that result set at all. Do you have a region set? I'd
appreciate emailing me a screen shot if you don't mind at yegg@duckduckgo.com

Btw, we index SO ourselves, e.g. <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nginx+apache>

We just have a high bar to show it, but are working on that piece so it comes
up more. It's also full punctuation.

~~~
heyitsnick
Email sent, but for other readers' reference, shots taken in anon chrome:

ddg: <http://i.minus.com/iKakLPppwCv14.jpg>

google: <http://i.minus.com/iZvY24AxfnHRR.jpg>

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vilya
Totally off-topic, but why do some people write 'mm' when they mean (I
presume) million? From the subject line I initially thought Duck Duck Go had
passed 1 millimetre of searches per day.

~~~
gk1
M is the roman numeral for 1,000. So MM is meant as 1,000 x 1,000, which
equals 1,000,000 (one million). OP should have used capital letters, as mm
does indeed denote millimeters. Better yet, just use the more common M symbol
to mean "million."

~~~
ajarmoniuk
Pedantic: MM means 2 tousand if we are really to stick to roman numerals.

~~~
xtacy
Another pedantic remark is that people use $1K instead of $1M to mean $1000.

I think it's fine to use whatever it takes to get the message across.

~~~
nuttendorfer
Which stands for kilo and is correct.

~~~
ph0rque
Lowercase k stands for kilo; K stands for Kelvin (as long as we're being
pedantic).

~~~
batista
It is uppercase in the comment above.

And a letter can stand for multiple things, from temperatures to chemical
elements to whatever.

As long as we're being pedantic, that is.

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MatthewPhillips
Awesome. Resist the temptation to create DuckDuckMail, DuckDuckPlus,
DuckDuckMaps. Stick to what makes DDG great; a simple, private, universal
search engine.

~~~
jader201
While I agree that DDG should keep it simple, two of the three Google examples
you've given -- Gmail and Maps -- are products I rely heavily on, and am glad
Google decided to branch out for those two products alone.

I would have listed other, more toxic and/or embarrassingly unsuccessful
examples, like:

\- Privacy practices \- Adsense/Adwords \- Search personalization "features"
\- Docs \- Buzz \- Jaiku \- Wave \- etc...

~~~
fckin
Adsense? Are you serious? Google isn't a search engine. It's an ads engine.

Without Adsense, there is no Google. Everything else is just a platform for
it.

~~~
jader201
Not sure what you're arguing. I was using Adsense as an example of a toxic
product from Google.

~~~
jonknee
Perhaps toxic, but Adsense/Adwords are what make Google possible. Without
revenue there's no Google.

~~~
AJ007
The dis-proportionality of contextual pay per click revenue has financed
Google's excursions in to all of these other areas.

One has to wonder if Google had just stuck with search, the search product
would be significantly better than it is today. Instead we've got Google
trying to be everything to everyone, at the cost of the integrity of those
search results.

~~~
the-cakeboss
Have the search results degraded that much in your opinion? I still find their
results the most useful.

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kiloaper
Well done to Gabriel. I love the clean design and customisability of DDG and
the privacy policy. However I wonder if he's figured out a way to monetise it
without sacrificing user experience [1] to keep it viable into the future.

[1] <https://duck.co/topic/financing-model>

~~~
gsa
They have had sponsored links for quite some time now, but I wonder how that
pairs up with BOSS API not being free anymore.

~~~
hardtke
BOSS queries are $0.80 per thousand queries, so $0.0008 per search. A web
search site that uses a premium sponsored link feed should be able to generate
about $0.04 per query (50% share of the $0.09 per query that Google makes).
Thus the revenue generated could be about 50 times the cost of the raw
materials (the BOSS search results). BOSS is cheap in that regard. If you
extrapolate to an entire year, DDG could be making about $15 million per year
in revenue if they chose to show ads aggressively.

~~~
ryanhuff
Pardon my ignorance on the matter of ad revenue, but $0.04 per each search
query? That sounds very high.

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myoder
I'm rooting for Blekko and DDG and pretty much anything that will uproot or
disturb Google's stronghold.

For one, I miss the days when Google search felt fresh, magical, and honest.
Search Plus Your World just irks me, because, as many have pointed out, it
isn't providing relevant results and its shoving G+ down my throat.

As an aside, I'm interested to see which major search engine will partner with
Tumblr. I'm not smart enough to figure out the details of the relationship,
but I think have access to their stream of data could be pretty cool.

~~~
justinlau
When you eliminate the reblogged duplicate content, that stream would just be
a trickle. ;)

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Yohohoman
1 millimetre? Who measures Searches Per Day in millimetres?

~~~
nodata
I read it the same.

M = 1'000 in Roman. So MM is a million.

~~~
coob
MM is a million. mm is a millimetre.

~~~
troymc
In the metric system,

1 mm = 0.001 m = 0.001 metres

but

1 MM = 1000000 M = 1000000 ?????

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AznHisoka
DDG and even Bing/Yahoo both need to index much more of the web if they want
to be competitive. You just can't beat anyone in quality when you have fewer
results to work with - it's just simple math. I hope DDG uses some of its
investment money on solving this problem (as well as speed, but speed is
secondary). The bang codes, privacy, etc are all great.

~~~
mikkom
isn't ddg a meta search engine (if I remember correctly they scraped google
and used yahoo search api)? Or has this changed?

~~~
crazedpsyc
It uses Yahoo, Bing, and a number of other sources (but not google). See
[http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...](http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources)
:)

~~~
AznHisoka
Then they are limited to what's in Bing's/Yahoo's index, and their index is
vastly inferior to Google's... it's not even close. This is partially why
Google has better results - they simply crawl more of the web (plus their
algorithm too, of course).

Why can't DDG just cut their losses and invest in building their own index?
It's much more worth it in the long run. All DDG is doing is adding cool, nice
to have UI features on top of Bing/Yahoo, but what about the core?

~~~
mikkom
I'm quite sure they used to use google in the past

> Why can't DDG just cut their losses and invest in building their own index?

That's far from trivial task.. Scraping and using other peoples results is
easy, building and scaling a huge database like search index is one of the
hardest problems you can find.

~~~
AznHisoka
Ok that's fair. But in that case, I don't understand what compelling way DDG
is differentiating themselves from other search engines besides a few cool,
nice, thin value features.

~~~
mikkom
.. that's almost exactly what I'm thinking too ..

------
_feda_
I always liked the site but to be honest after using it as my default search
engine briefly in chromium, i found it didn't quite compare to google in terms
of:

1\. Performance. There's a small but significant gap between the two services
in terms of the speed in which they serve redirects and search results.

2\. Features. Although a lack of features like mail, maps etc. is, I suppose,
part of ddg's philosophy, I feel like it's merely inconvenient compared to
google where all it's services are immediately available with a click. Also,
ddg doesn't save any web history which can actually be very useful for people
using more than one computer.

It's not that I dislike ddg and what it does. It fills a nice gap in the
market and I like it's principles of privacy. But for now, performance trumps
freedom I guess :p

~~~
_feda_
in hindsight this comment seems a little harsh. It's not fair at all to
compare the two in terms of performance when google is a huge multinational
with servers all over the world and ddg only has a few (I imagine)

~~~
epi0Bauqu
We are working on this issue -- where are you located?

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lookelsewhere
This is great news. I remember a previous post where the HN community
suggested minor improvements on the placement of sponsored links, and DDG was
quick to suggest a fix was in the works. The partnership done with Linux Mint
means that they have been my default search engine ( + thousands of others)
for about 3 months now. There isn't a feeling of loss felt by using their
service, except on a few, rare occasions.

... I just hope they stay true to their goals _it seems silly to compete on
crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've
focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think
are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam,
real privacy and a better overall search experience._
[http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...](http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources)

------
Chirag
Congratulations to DDG Team, I switch to DDG around a month back and have
loved it ever since. !yt, !so..<http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html> are really
good when you want the search to get out of the way.

Amazing job!

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troymc
My favourite part about using DDG is the !bang operators. Now I can search
Wikipedia, Amazon, Google, etc. from the same "command line" (i.e. my Firefox
search box). Awesome.

<https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html>

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beothorn
I wonder how much of those come from mint installs, anyone have this
information?

~~~
codesuela
I think Opera has DDG as default search engine too

~~~
sequoia
<http://screencast.com/t/yZIkmNkMV8wp> ^ Fresh Opera install. Opera ships with
DDG but _not_ as the default. Frankly I would guess that the impact this has
is insignificant: Opera has a small user base in the first place, and ddg is
just one of several options in a list. How many people will, without
prompting, explore what this new search is in their Opera, and understand the
benefit of using it? At first blush (without knowledge of the privacy
protections, bang syntax etc.) DDG is just a cleaner, slower, unfamiliar
google with worse results. (I say this as someone with DDG as his default on
all browsers.)

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ww520
Guess my use of it is in the stat. :) I'm using may be 50% DDG and 50% Google.
Still training my muscle memory on the hot key.

DDG's privacy policy is superb. Its search result is pretty good with non of
the bloats. I still remember how Google Preview was infuriatingly distracting
that I had to install add-on to get rid of it completely.

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buster
And that where i switched from Google to DDG yesterday, great :)

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zerop
I like navigating the search results on DDG....Good service..

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mmphosis
1mm?

