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.
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).
I trusted Google, I bought their products and I used their services, I bought a nexus one and always said yes to them monitoring my data, I thought it would help them understand me better. I loved wave, got into the plus beta, I thought Google was part of my brain.
Then they banned me from G+ for using my own name. The appeal process took two months, was entirely impersonal and finally resulted in me remaining banned. When combined with their widespread censorship, capitulation to corrupt governments and the new privacy policy.. As far as I am concerned, I am not leaving Google, Google left me.
It's Google privacy, or lack of, that drove me to DDG. I clicked on a Youtube video link on Reddit the other day and it asked me to verify my age. I didn't have a Youtube account! Then I remember it's after March 1 and Google is using my GMail account for Youtube. I didn't create a Youbute account because I don't want to. No thanks. I don't want my video watching or search being tracked.
This is off-topic, sorry, but if you change the youtube link from /watch?v=CODE to /v/CODE you usually get a working full-window player without an age verification prompt. You lose the often insightful comments of the youtube community, though, so it's not all roses.
Just a preface, I'm giving this anecdotally, not claiming it to be the cause.
I was at a birthday lunch the other Sunday and it was an extended family kind of event, when my mum, who is considerably computer illiterate, was talking about DuckDuckGo. You can imagine my surprise, DDG to me has always been something of a geek's search engine.
Apparently it had been covered by the morning news, as a viable alternative to google. Not only this, the segment was apparently recommending people opt out of google tracking their usage, brought about by the recent privacy changes.
I don't know if you consider their privacy policy change a recent gaffe, but I would consider that story to be an indirect result of those changes.
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?
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.
I wasn't sure if that was DNS resolution or simply Google "forwarding" that was slow. Either way it has been fairly annoying -- almost to the point that I'm loading cached pages and looking on that page for a direct link.
I don't think ISP is playing a role as I experience similar results at $HOME and $WORK which are on 2 completely different networks/backbones.
It's a legitimate reason to switch. I first became skeptical of Google when they released the awful Blog Search. Here was a search company, with a growing market being neglected and their entry was an absolute dud. This was around the same time that they were releasing a lot of non-search products. I wondered where their priorities were then, and today there is no doubt.
I switched to DDG after Google started giving me 500 server errors in every web search, complete with a request to send a bug report to an email address that turns out to be undeliverable. That was about 3 weeks ago, and I've been generally much happier with DDG (despite the standard caveat of subpar search results).
In the traffic graph there seems to be a distinct correlation between the changed privacy policy and the start of the rapid growth. Did Google not announce it in early or mid January?
Myself I have long thought of switching from Google due to their annoying UI changes and their lack of regard of user privacy, but this change privacy policy was the thing that finally motivated me to switch.
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.
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!).
"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?
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.
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.
The answer is, you wouldn't if you're concerned about privacy. DDG delivers decent enough results and part of their philosophy is that they claim not to track users.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...).
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.
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.
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.