

Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 - reitzensteinm
http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html?

======
zmmmmm
I've switched to ddg for my basic searches. Hard searches still go through
Google but the truth is, most of my searches these days are because I can't be
bothered bookmarking stuff, not because they are difficult searches.

The nymwars are the main reason I switched. Ironically I always have had my
real name attached to my account. However Google suddenly insisting on it
being my real name makes me very paranoid about what Google could possibly
want from it. I'm happy for them to use data about me anonymously - I couldn't
care less if they mine every email I ever send and every search I ever do as
long as I am sure it is safe and secure and impersonal. But as soon as I get a
sense they are not treating my participation as anonymous they lose the lot,
and that's effectively what they did with the nymwars.

~~~
naner
I switched awhile back and I use ddg mostly the same way you do, though as of
late it has felt slower.

Google's social integration, instant search, image previews, and advanced
feature removal have made it a chore to use and I'm too lazy to go around
disabling every new feature they come up with. Part of me wishes I still had
the plain 'ol classic Google interface and behavior but I guess the site is
now geared towards everyday folks, not techies.

I gave Chrome a spin the other day again (haven't used it in months) and the
default twitchy instant search behavior seemed bizarre and jarring. I think I
must be becoming an old fart...

I also think that search quality has gone down at Google (ddg still doesn't
hold a candle to Google in that regard, however).

~~~
mverwijs
> geared towards everyday folks, not techies.

See, that is what I do not get. Google claims to be able to create a better
product experience based on all that datamining they do.

If that is the case, why don't they change the user interface based on what
type of person they think I am? They have the data for it, or don't they?

------
ChrisLTD
I'm curious how much DDG's traffic has grown as a direct result of Google's
perceived gaffes in the last few months.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I switched to DDG after Google started
pushing Plus in their search results.

~~~
stcredzero
_I'm curious how much DDG's traffic has grown as a direct result of Google's
perceived gaffes in the last few months._

It's not Google gaffes, but unavailability that's been driving my DDG use.
Whenever google.com fails to resolve in DNS for me, or Google's server fails
to respond, I switch to DDG. Unfortunately, events like this have been
happening frequently of late.

I'm on Comcast in Houston. Anyone else experiencing this?

~~~
JS_startup
You're not the only one. I counted three occasions just in the last week when
an attempted Google visit timed out, yet DDG and Bing worked fine. Not sure
what's going on behind the scenes at Google.

------
micahflee
I've been using DGG for a couple of months now and it's been great. As a
programmer, it turns out that like 50% of what I search for at work is
programming reference stuff, so I've found the !php and !jquery syntax totally
awesome.

There's still occasionally searches that I make that I can't find what I need
from DGG, so I manually go to google for those (and of course for image
search). But DGG definitely meets my daily needs for a search engine, and I
love how privacy friendly it it.

~~~
prakash
You can use "!gi" to search google images from DDG & "!bi" to search bing
images.

~~~
zecho
!i brings up Google images, too.

------
buster
I've tried DDG a few days but was disappointed by search speed and search
results.

I've found <https://startpage.com/> much better in terms of search results and
speed. It's basically just proxy'ing to google (which is great, imo).

~~~
andrewcooke
this is great. i tried ddg, was also frustrated by the speed, and returned to
google. this is an easy drop-in replacement for that and works much faster.

------
loopdoend
I wonder how much of this traffic is from Tor... Google blocks most searches
routed via Tor exit nodes and the queries are rerouted to DDG by the tor
browser (yay EFF!).

~~~
derrida
"Google blocks most searches routed by Tor exit nodes" - Really? I've never
had a problem, but the last time I used Tor was a week ago. Has something
changed?

~~~
thesnider
They don't 'block' most of the searches -- they just put up a CAPTCHA before
each SRP.

------
scrrr
I was surprised to read an article on DDG in a mainstream (albeit liberal)
german newspaper "Die Zeit". It's getting press.

At the same time, I've tried <http://www.hotbot.com> again (last time I tried
it perhaps 10 years ago) and I was quite pleased with the search results. So
yes, there definitely is a world outside of Google. And it's working well.

But who else has GMail, Documents, Maps, Cache, Translate.. that's a major
advantage for the #1.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Bing.

Microsoft has Hotmail, Skydrive, Bing Maps, Cache, Translate and tons more.

~~~
moondowner
The point was, who else has a good search engine and also offers other
services.

I don't recall Bing as a good search engine.

And additionally, there are better services than Hotmail (like Gmail),
Skydrive (like Google Docs), etc etc..

~~~
EwanToo
Bing is a very good search engine, pretty much identical to Google for my
searches.

~~~
p0ss
DDG's default search _is_ Bing.

------
riledhel
Any idea how much Linux Mint and other projects embracing DuckDuckGo as their
default search engine deliver to it?

~~~
reitzensteinm
I'd like to know that too. I've emailed Gabriel, hopefully he'd be interested
in sharing.

Edit: He answered the question here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3598541>

------
pnathan
I use DDG about 2/3 of the time. Like others have said, its initial search
quality is not up to Google's, and also its speed isn't either.

However, I do think that DDG is a more truthful search engine: it seems to
search for what you ask for, not what it thinks you want. This provides, in my
opinion, a more nuanced web, where interesting things can turn up that
_aren't_ highly "ranked".

And, I do prefer Gabriel's focus on anonymity and non-bubbling.

------
Chrono
I like the idea of DDG but it is quite frankly of little use to me. For most
English terms it works reasonably well but for other languages such my mother
tongue, Swedish, it is more or less useless. I found most results to be close
to useless but I have not used DDG to a great degree because of this issue.

I rather take relevant results results in multiple languages while being
logged than less relevant results without being logged.

~~~
bleakgadfly
Have you set your regional settings in DDG to "Sweden"?

Heres a comparison between search results when I chose "English" vs.
"Norwegian" on a Norwgeian term: <http://i.imgur.com/ReIa5.png>

~~~
Chrono
Ah, that might be a improvement but then the questions becomes, how does the
English results become affected by me changing it to Swedish?

To be fair I do most of my searches in English and therefore it might cause
irrelevant results again. Changing back and forth depending on what language I
am search for is hardly ideal.

Will have a look to see how it affects my searches.

------
lignuist
I switched to DDG after scroogle's shutdown. DDG feels a bit slower - obvious,
since they add some features, while scroogle basically was just a proxy. What
I didn't like about scroogle was their negative attitude (at least it seemed
negative to me).

I tried also <http://gigablast.com> , which is nice, but its index is too
small for general purpose searching.

------
eostyx
I like using DuckDuckGo with Google Chrome because its Omnibox searching is
really fast. Unlike Chrome, Mozilla Firefox suffers this annoying 2 second
delay for searching through the main URL bar. Quite frankly I'm mad with
Mozilla for sticking with two damn separate search utilities.

Who else doesn't like the slow ass URL-bar search for Firefox?

------
twelvechairs
I switched to ddg to try it out, and am still using it, mostly because of the
bang syntax, not because its general search results are better than Google's,
or because of privacy concerns (as long as you tell google not to remember
your search history I'm not too worried...).

~~~
user3528
you can't tell google not to remember your search history...

you can only tell them not to personalize your search results with your search
history.

you don't need to be worried, just aware that unless you put effort into it,
pretty much everything you do on the web is knowable by google.

------
tinio
Not surprised as I'm also in the camp of having switched to ddg as default
search engine.

------
yardie
I've been using DDG ever since I submitted a bug and got a response from yegg
a few hours later. That lets me know someone on the other side really cares
and I'm not just firing emails off into the dark.

------
bearwithclaws
Always put a smile on my face when I spot somebody using DDG.

------
nyar
Un/fortunately Bing won't have access to this data to make their search engine
better. Duckduck is good for hiding porn, not for finding hard to find stuff.

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donniezazen
One major reason, I like Google search is their Omnibox autofill suggestions.
It makes things real easy.

