[HN Gopher] DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries
___________________________________________________________________
DuckDuckGo Reaches 100M Daily Search Queries
Author : Aaronmacaron
Score : 381 points
Date : 2021-01-14 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (duckduckgo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (duckduckgo.com)
| Kreotiko wrote:
| Been using it for few years now, technical searches and in some
| languages other than English are still subpar compared to Google
| but you can add !g and it will open google on those ones
| drocer88 wrote:
| How does DuckDuckGo do ads? Do they contract this out or manage
| it internally?
| iphorde wrote:
| Both, depends on the search.
| lights0123 wrote:
| They use Microsoft Advertising:
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/company/advertising-and-
| affiliat..., more info: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-
| help-pages/company/ad...
| paul7986 wrote:
| I seem to be using the Google bang command less past few months.
| I started using DDG in Dec 2018 after a story here showed (with
| evidence) that Google invited a female inventor out for an
| interview & then stole/patented her work.
|
| Overall using two search engines provides solid results with DDG
| being my main engine.
|
| It was cool to see DDG browser app in the top 20 iPhone apps this
| week!
| jagger27 wrote:
| A few dozen of those were mine! For geographically local stuff I
| have to use !g unless I get really specific with my search term
| (which is understandable). But for most other things DDG is good
| enough.
| gbil wrote:
| same here. I've set DDG as my default search engine, yet for
| local stuff I have to use !g . At the same time the region
| selection/force feature is just great
| obilgic wrote:
| Looking at different website's google analytics, I can tell that
| DDG has been picking up last 12 months. Possibly cuz of all FB,
| TWTR, GOOG privacy chatter.
| iphorde wrote:
| Yep.
| Dig1t wrote:
| I would be very curious to see what percentage of these are "!g"
| queries, but this is still awesome. Very happy to see they are
| doing well. I'm definitely a full-time DDG user.
| aarchi wrote:
| Since switching to DDG, I haven't used Google Search once nor
| !g. I've had a better experience with DDG: no sponsored
| results, less skewed rankings, less censoring (Google removes
| many results from DMCA requests), and of course no tracking.
| Google's lazy-loaded useless suggestion boxes, added a few
| years ago, that push the content down, often when clicking on a
| link, were my final annoyance before switching. For the first
| bit after switching, I missed seeing the daily Google doodles,
| but I'm now more cynical towards Google and no longer care.
| bargl wrote:
| I've been using DDG for a while now as my primary search. I've
| found it does a much more literal searches, but doesn't always
| interpret the intent of my sentence as well as Google does.
|
| I find myself using the !g at times when I can tell that the
| search didn't work as well as what I've seen on Google, but
| it's become much less frequent.
| dmje wrote:
| lol, I came here to post something snarky along the lines of
| "...of which 95% are !g" but you beat me to it and did it in a
| nicer way too :-)
|
| And yes, me too - I do love DDG, very happy user.
| yoran wrote:
| Same here. I find myself doing that a lot... My experience is
| that Google's search results are superior to DDG's.
| sergiosgc wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I also use DDG with a !g fallback. I'd
| place the success of fall-backing to Google at 20% at most.
| (i.e. most of the time, if DDG fails, Google will fail too).
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| One factor you might not be thinking about is that if you use
| DDG first then you're getting a biased sample. You only try
| Google when DDG fails. So you see some times when Google
| succeeded where DDG failed, but you don't notice the times
| when DDG succeeded but Google would have failed.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| I pretty much always go with whatever DDG has for most things.
| If needed I'll redo the query with "!g" to confirm an d in my
| experience there are a lot of times the DDG query was better in
| my opinion. Things like about locations or very recent news are
| usually easier to find on Google though.
|
| I also use "!a" and "!yt" all the time as well.
| irrational wrote:
| I've been using DDG as my sole search engine for years. I
| didn't even know !g was a thing.
| kleebeesh wrote:
| I wonder how many of those are "!g" queries? I've tried very hard
| to adopt duckduckgo but it just doesn't cut it, especially for
| technical topics.
| drocer88 wrote:
| On the other hand, Duckduckgo news is much better than
| google's.
| calimac wrote:
| I wonder why?...
| emrah wrote:
| I would be willing to create an account and let DDG track me as
| long as it would improve my search results (at least in some
| contexts, like for work) and I was 100% in charge of what they
| retain.
| albertopv wrote:
| I have been using DDG for 6 months, I'd say 90% of times results
| are good enough to find what I'm looking for. I even tried DDG
| Apple powered maps,but Gmaps is still vastly superior, imho
| ravedave5 wrote:
| I've been switched to DDG for about 4 months now. I am loving the
| Ads I get in youtube now that google doesn't know what I am
| interested in they have noting to do with anything I care about.
| It's wonderful. DDG still has a way to go for really technical
| queries. I just can't get the same results about this error or
| that in Java. Until then I'm 100% DDG for personal and 100%
| google for work.
| sneeuwpopsneeuw wrote:
| I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always
| search for things technical or non-technical there first. If it
| does not give any result or when I know it's very technical I
| simply add !g to the end (but you can add it anywhere) and it
| automatically searches the same thing in Google.
|
| Some examples of things I personally thing DDG could improve /
| is different then Google:
|
| - DDG gives the feeling they prefer wikipedia over stack
| overflow. Stack overflow ranks often second.
|
| - GLSL shaders. DDG does not index websites such as shadertoy.
| Example search for "Gold Noise Uniform Random"
|
| - indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days
| before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video.
| Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so I
| searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos only
| photos and articles. Google found a few videos including once
| on a dutch news website.
|
| - Visual search and reverse image lookup is not that great.
| Only in Bing you can search for a video based on a image DDG
| and Google both can not do that. So both could improve that.
|
| - DDG sometimes gives the feeling not enough people have
| searched for something, This feeling is more a feeling then a
| real thing. This is mostly because Google finds a lot of
| spelling / typo's in your search query and DDG appears to only
| repairs it until it contains valid words. Example search for "A
| apple a day keps the", Google corrects AN and KEEPS but
| DuckDuckGo only corrects KEEPS.
|
| - Old websites are not indexed that well. Example if you are
| developing a gameboy advance game it takes a while before you
| find Tonc (one of the best resources regarding GBA
| development). With google this experience is terrible as well
| but it takes less time to find some good things.
| divbzero wrote:
| Note that the comments regarding indexing should be
| attributed to Bing, the underlying search engine that DDG
| uses currently. I too switch to !g occasionally when
| searching particular niches.
| kaszanka wrote:
| I use !sp (Startpage). It's basically a Google proxy, if I
| understand correctly.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Example search for "A apple a day keps the", Google
| corrects AN and KEEPS but DuckDuckGo only corrects KEEPS._
|
| Not just spell check but Google understands natural language
| queries, too, better than duck.com.
|
| Ex A:
|
| https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/search?q=the%20movie%20wher.
| ..
|
| https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the%20movie%20where%20.
| ..
| breiti wrote:
| > I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always
| search for things technical or non-technical there first. If
| it does not give any result or when I know it's very
| technical I simply add !g to the end
|
| I am the same, but i default to !sp (startpage.com) first.
|
| They claim:
|
| > You can't beat Google when it comes to online search. So
| we're paying them to use their brilliant search results in
| order to remove all trackers and logs. [...]
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| you do know that startpage.com "is now owned by an ad
| company" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| don't use !g use !sp which is startpage, a proxy for google
| searches that won't tell google what you're searching for
| TobTobXX wrote:
| > - indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days
| before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video.
| Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so
| I searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos
| only photos and articles. Google found a few videos including
| once on a dutch news website.
|
| If I _know_ that I am searching a YouTube video, I usually
| search directly on youtube.com. I use Firefox search keywords
| for this, I just type "yt Rick Astley Never" in my top bar
| and instantly see the results. Pretty sure Chromium et al.
| should have something similar...
| DamnYuppie wrote:
| I use DDG as well. I use FF as my primary personal browser, I
| have installed uBlock Origin and Enhancer for YouTube,
| https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube, and I now never
| get any ads on YouTube.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do you use the "Send Feedback" in the bottom-
| right(!) corner of the results page to let them know? I have
| almost zero belief it _does_ anything, but without even
| attempting to provide feedback I don 't think it's reasonable
| to expect any change
| AdamSC1 wrote:
| As the person who just read through feedback today, I can
| assure you that each piece of feedback sent is received, read
| and logged by real humans who care and more importantly
| deeply appreciate the fact that users take time to send
| feedback :)
| mdaniel wrote:
| Foremost, thank you for your service! I really, really want
| DDG to be successful and I'm glad to know the feedback
| doesn't /dev/null. If I might be so bold as to suggest that
| hiding the "Send Feedback" in the bottom right is a very
| opaque location for what is arguably a vital interaction
| DDG has with its users.
|
| While I have an insider: I see a lot of mentions in the
| threads about folks who use "!g" or "!sp" -- are those
| counted as votes of suboptimal DDG results? I could see it
| going either way: it's a bad metric for those users who
| just _default_ to doing it, but it 's a good metric for
| searches that end in the frustration of a series of bad DDG
| results
| mcescalante wrote:
| I have the same experience - my two major issues with DDG are
| the results for technical searches, and I wish that it showed
| more basic info for businesses like phone number/address/hours
| without me having to click around a bunch.
| Airyleech wrote:
| I use ublock origin, I don't get ads on youtube.
| conradfr wrote:
| There is on mobile and there's so much nowadays that I had to
| stop clicking video links on my phone.
| hojjat12000 wrote:
| You can use Youtube Vanced (Youtube Advance without the Ad)
| on your phone. I can not recommend it enough. It also
| supports "Sponsor blocker". It's the best app for youtube
| addicts.
| conradfr wrote:
| I was fine with a small amount of ads but yeah I guess
| I'll have to try it now.
|
| The irony is that I was a Google Play Music subscriber
| until its death but in my country you still had the
| Youtube ads.
| acatsdream wrote:
| You can have ublock origin on firefox mobile.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I use it to but I use a manual blocker with my own lists. I
| can't find a way to block YouTube ads.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| I pay for YouTube's premium service and I don't get ads
| either.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I do too and pay everywhere I can for the services that I
| use. The world would be a far better place if it didn't
| need ad support, and the only alternative that so far works
| at all is direct payment.
| dimator wrote:
| Along these lines, why doesn't google introduce a paid
| search service without ads? My hunch is that no matter the
| price point, it would be a huge revenue hit compared to
| actual advertising payments.
|
| My other hunch is that it would make the non ad-free
| experience greatly cheapened in the eyes of the consumer,
| in the same way youtube with ads feels different after
| experiencing youtube premium.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| They have Google Workspace, which is pretty similar, but
| more focused on small businesses.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Because if you allow a paid option, all the people worth
| advertising to switch to that, and now the advertising
| portion of the business is worth a lot less.
|
| They're betting they can get more out of advertisers than
| paying subscribers.
| quadrangle wrote:
| https://mimiandeunice.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2011/10/ME_486_...
| mrweasel wrote:
| I do the same. I am a little annoyed that I can't pay for
| ad-free Youtube without also buying YouTube Music, which I
| didn't need.
|
| Content costs money, and if I don't want ads, I need to pay
| the difference. I where a little surprised to see Linus
| Tech Tips break down they income and showing that Youtube
| Premium as significant source of revenue.
| radium3d wrote:
| As a music listener I love YouTube music app, it's great
| being able to listen to almost anything I want in high
| quality any time.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| I tried a couple years ago, but didn't like it that much.
| Ended up going back to spotify.
|
| I remember trying to get the Guardians of the Galaxy
| awesome mix, and it only had a youtube video with all
| songs glued together. Also, it was a bit weird experience
| overall because they matched so many random videos
| mrweasel wrote:
| It is great, I just didn't want it originally, but now
| that I paying for it I've started using it a fair bit.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| When I tried it, I couldn't deal with it auto-generating
| a 'related' playlist whenever I played anything. (I pay
| for YT Premium, so if I could use YT Music then I
| wouldn't have to pay for Spotify.) How did you deal with
| that problem?
| azinman2 wrote:
| I think it's they're intrinsically baked together as
| YouTube has had to license music for all those YouTube
| music videos, which are hugely popular as you could
| imagine.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Yeah. I don't use YouTube Music and don't care about
| downloading or background playback, so I'm not ready to
| pay $11.99/month just to hide ads.
| Aperocky wrote:
| +1 to this. I haven't seen ads for years until I switched to
| M1 macs and had to use safari for a while.
| azinman2 wrote:
| There are content blockers for safari.
| accented wrote:
| I use unlock origin, I didnt eve know there were ads on
| YouTube.
| nostromo wrote:
| Pro tip: on iOS most adblockers will block YouTube ads so
| long as you use youtube.com in the browser, not the YouTube
| app.
|
| YouTube in the browser has almost all features of the app
| now, so there's no compelling reason to use the YouTube app.
| barbacoa wrote:
| The key to technical questions in ddg is to be very verbose.
| From tracking you Google knows you're a programer who works in
| Java, ddg doesn't do that by design.
|
| When I search "transformer" in ddg I get the movie franchise,
| when I do it in Google I get the ones you see hanging on
| utility poles. Google knows I look at power electronics. When I
| search "voltage transformer" in ddg I get the same quality
| results as google.
| [deleted]
| tiborsaas wrote:
| > they have noting to do with anything I care about
|
| Why is this good? For me personally, both FB and Google figured
| out that I'm into home renovation and all they keep
| recommending me is relevant stuff. So I consider it free
| research done for me :) Contractors, webshops, pretty images
| are all over my feed.
|
| I even press accept cookies for webshops I want to see more of
| their competition :)
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Eh. I don't really want to be sold to even if the thing I'm
| being sold might be interesting to me. I don't need more
| stuff and I really don't need my brain thinking I need more
| stuff. To each their own.
| simias wrote:
| I use DDG as well but I went further and told Firefox to use a
| dedicated container for google domains. I also did it because
| they made Youtube really annoying to use when you're not logged
| in, so I made a burner account but it's only active inside this
| container and they can't track me around the web (at least, not
| with that).
| Marsymars wrote:
| The Enhancer for YouTube extension cuts down on the annoying
| things when not logged in. I was able to move to YouTube to
| temporary containers using the EfYT extension to set my
| preferences.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| How do you specify what sites to be put in a container? What
| I want to be able to do is anytime I click on my bookmark
| link, it'll open it up in a new container. I haven't figured
| out a way to do this without some manual process.
| simias wrote:
| The official "Multi-Account Containers" extension does
| that. Honestly I don't understand why it's not built-in,
| because as you mention without it it's hard not to "leak"
| outside of the containers.
|
| With it you can associate domains with containers and tell
| Firefox to always open them in a container. It will also
| automatically un-containerize if you follow a link to a
| third party domain. Basically how I expect containers to
| work.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
| account...
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Holy crap thank you so much for this! This was the
| primary thing I complained about for containers and why I
| never bothered to use them. I completely agree this
| should've been integrated with it and it makes no sense
| to me why. Containers as it is are pretty tedious.
| f1refly wrote:
| You might enjoy invidious. It's a frontend for youtube that
| cuts 99% of the bloat and show videos directly in your html5
| player. It even supports subscriptions without a google
| account!
| TobTobXX wrote:
| FWIW you can also subscribe to YouTube channels / Playlists
| (IIRC) via RSS feeds. I think they removed the official
| buttons, but the links still work and are easy to forge by
| hand.
| pixxel wrote:
| Is it still running ok. Didn't the main instance shutdown
| or something? Sorry, I forget the specifics.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| You can run your own instance; that's what I do. Public
| instances tend to be overloaded or their external IP
| becomes temporarily banned by YouTube (since its traffic
| is obviously more than what a typical home would use).
| aarchi wrote:
| I haven't had success with using Invidious. I'd love to
| ditch the YT frontend and tracking though.
|
| I have extensions that remove suggested videos on the
| sidebar, homepage, and during the video; as well as ads,
| comments, and product recommendations. I use YT in a
| Firefox container without an account that is separate
| from my other Google container.
| zaroth wrote:
| My nit with DDG is that I like to run my iPhone in Dark Mode, but
| I really don't like the dark mode rendering of DDG.
|
| I always browse in Private mode, so switching the session to
| light mode is totally unhelpful.
|
| I wonder if anyone else runs into this and found a workaround?
| [deleted]
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Plenty of people saying it already but I'll throw my voice into
| the mix too. Been using DDG for about a year straight across all
| devices and I honestly forgot I wasn't using Google. I have never
| been unable to find anything I was after, well except for some
| unusual Hail Mary queries with exact phrase matches, but those
| are my fault and likely wouldn't return anything from Google
| search either.
|
| If you're on the fence... it's literally free and completely
| painless to switch out the default search engine in every browser
| I have used at least, I recommend trying it out!
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Some people perceive Google to be better because when DDG fails,
| they try Google and sometimes Google succeeds.
|
| That's no different than flipping a coin and hoping for heads.
| You normally flip with your right hand, but when it comes up
| tails you try again with your left. About half the time, your
| left succeeds where your right fails, therefore your left hand is
| better at flipping coins. I'm sure there's a name for that bias?
| (Notice that you could do it in reverse and draw the reverse
| conclusion - the same goes for Google and DDG.)
|
| To actually compare them, you'd need to do the same searches on
| both, not just the ones where DDG did poorly.
| TekMol wrote:
| To the webmasters here on HN:
|
| Do you see this reflected in higher user numbers coming from
| DuckDuckGo over time?
|
| I run a website too. Let me check the stats...
|
| So according to Google Analytics over the last 30 days, 0.7% of
| my visitors came from DDG. Not bad. That is more then half of
| Bing, from which 1.2% of my visitors come.
|
| Over time, the DuckDuckGo trend does not look as exponential as
| in their chart though. More like a linear growth that about
| doubled from early 2019 to now. But that could be due to many
| factors of course. Blocked analytics being one.
| AdamSC1 wrote:
| If users are using the DuckDuckGo mobile app or extension its
| baked in tracker blocker does block a lot of analytics tools so
| there is likely a large level of under reporting especially on
| the mobile side.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Google 83%, Bing 9%, DDG 3%, Yahoo 2%.
|
| This time last year: Google 89%, Bing 6%, DDG 1.9%, Yahoo 1.9%.
| yabones wrote:
| From the last 30 days:
|
| >1k - Google
|
| 65 - DDG
|
| 20 - Bing
|
| 6 - Startpage
|
| 1 - Yandex
| markosaric wrote:
| Congrats to DuckDuckGo! It's amazing to see a privacy-first
| Google alternative making such great progress! I personally
| contribute with a few searches every day :)
|
| Just checked the stats for our startup:
|
| December:
|
| Google 5.3k visitors
|
| DDG 589 visitors
|
| Bing 57 visitors
|
| This month it looks a bit closer:
|
| Google 2.8k
|
| DDG 378
|
| Bing 36
| Semaphor wrote:
| 56.8% google
|
| 38.6% direct
|
| 1.44% bing
|
| 0.34% startpage
|
| 0.3% ecosia
|
| 0.27% DDG
|
| But I feel like non-google users are more likely to block GA,
| so these stats are probably skewed.
| [deleted]
| sct202 wrote:
| Google - 96.3%
|
| Bing - 1.8%
|
| DDG - 1.0%
|
| Yahoo - 0.8%
| time0ut wrote:
| Ddg is so good at this point I forget I'm not using Google. I
| only have to drop in a !g a couple times a month at most.
|
| I am actually surprised it is only 100M per day. I think it would
| be much bigger if there was actual fair competition.
| himujjal wrote:
| specially for local results. thats where DDG is not upto the
| mark. Google has an advantage there.
|
| BTW, I DDGed for the last 2 years and never been happier. They
| have improved tremendously
| harha wrote:
| > specially for local results. thats where DDG is not upto
| the mark. Google has an advantage there.
|
| I've had a different experience, I prefer being able to
| choose the location. For technical queries it gives me better
| results, for general queries less SEO'ed content and when I
| want something local I change the switch. Bonus is that I can
| choose a different location, which has been useful this year
| because my travel pattern has changed to staying at a remote
| location for longer periods - I can still easily get my home
| country results when I need them without trying all sorts of
| extra keywords.
| AdamSC1 wrote:
| When you come across these, be sure to use the "Send
| Feedback" button in the bottom right. User feedback is an
| important part of improving in a non-tracking environment.
| harha wrote:
| I get reminded that I wasn't using Google in the rare case
| where I can't find what I'm looking for and !g or need to use a
| device I don't own and it shows how bad it's gotten (in
| particular hard to distinguish the ads - and the sheer amount
| of ads)
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Do DDG use any 3rd party search results by default? (for non-!g
| queries and the like)
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Yeah they do have their own index but the majority of results
| come from Bing. There are several search engines using Bing as
| the backbone, but Microsoft doesn't appear to want to have any
| new search partners. Both the google and Bing search indexes
| are controlled by trillion dollar companies, so alternative
| search engines are operating under agreements with either
| company.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| A search engine company without their own search engine is
| not very promising. I'm assuming/hoping they have plans to
| serve most queries themselves in the future.
| godshatter wrote:
| I looked around for a roadmap, but I haven't found one. I
| imagine that indexing large portions of the web is a huge
| investment, hopefully they can do more as time goes on and
| money comes in.
| timvisee wrote:
| Happy to be a part of it. Their bangs and vim bindings make me so
| efficient!
| guilhermetk wrote:
| After a few failed attempts to migrate from Google as my default
| search engine due to poor results, a couple of months ago, I
| decided to give DDG another try. Been using daily since, I don't
| even remember what Google is. Not sure if the service did improve
| that much or what, but I'm glad I could move on. Youtube, you are
| next.
| Engineering-MD wrote:
| What will you move from YouTube to?
| dimator wrote:
| I must be in the minority here, but even after trying ddg
| exclusively, I find myself doing !g all the time, to the point
| where I just switched back.
|
| I do many technical searches throughout the day, and ddg falls
| short basically every time. Google is always closer to the mark
| with my search _intent_ , with for example, deep links to stack
| overflow answers that ddg misses.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| My experience is the same, I eventually just switched my
| default search to Startpage
| quesera wrote:
| I've read so many people say this, but it does not match my
| experience at all.
|
| I use DDG 100% of the time, and _maybe_ retry on another
| search engine a couple times per month.
|
| There's clearly some difference, but I don't know what it is:
|
| - Search topic (my searches are mostly tech-related, but
| other family members are also happy on DDG)
|
| - Query style (I may be a bit literal/keyword-inclined, but
| others are more conversational)
|
| - Location?
| anfilt wrote:
| I honestly find it interesting people have trouble with
| duckduckgo. Although, the one thing I have found lacking is
| their exact phrase search. For exact queries I end up
| having to add !g the query. Otherwise, I find myself rarely
| needing to use google.
| quesera wrote:
| Exact phrases, even when quoted?
| wyck wrote:
| I think something improved, I used to switch back and forth
| probably used 80% Google, but know I now use DDG about 80% of
| the time.
| mrweasel wrote:
| DDG was pretty much evoled to the point where if doesn't
| yield a good result, most likely neither will Google.
| krtkush wrote:
| This rate of use is strikingly similar to mine[1].
|
| [1] I made a small add-on for firefox which tracks DDG usage
| and lists the usage stat.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/
| 6chars wrote:
| > I don't even remember what Google is
|
| If DDG has such severe memory-related side effects, I'm not
| sure I want to switch.
| danShumway wrote:
| I started using DuckDuckGo, and one day I woke up and all of
| my email was on Fastmail instead of Gmail. No memory of
| switching, but all of my contacts were moved over. My
| accounts were using Fastmail aliases.
|
| I called up my siblings and asked, "where did you get this
| email address, why are you emailing me here?" And they just
| said, "what are you talking about, you've always been on
| Fastmail." I have no idea what's going on. Sometimes I'll go
| to update my system, and I'll be using Pacman instead of the
| normal Debian package manager. Then the next day it will
| switch back. Sometimes I'll search for things online, and I
| won't find the result I'm looking for, but then a day later
| I'll get a physical letter in my mailbox with the answer to
| my question written on it.
|
| So anyway, long story short, I decided to switch Bing instead
| and so far that's had only minor side effects.
| jraby3 wrote:
| I would love some ideas for how to get rid of YouTube. What do
| you have in mind?
| TobTobXX wrote:
| As a first step you could try alternative frontends. On the
| web invidious1, on Android I suggest NewPipe.
|
| As a next step you could try out entirely different
| platforms. I personally find Peertube very appealing, because
| it federates with ActivityPub, which I already use and love.
| There's also LBRY, but I don't get how it works, so no
| opinion on that. It seems to have more well known publishers
| on it though.
|
| 1 AFAIK they don't (may not?) have an official instance. But
| there is a public list here: https://github.com/iv-
| org/documentation/blob/master/Invidiou...
| samfundev wrote:
| A lot of people are talking about the quality of DDG results and
| I thought I would mention that there is a way to tell DDG about
| their search results. It's pretty hidden but there is a "Send
| Feedback" button in the bottom right. They should really make it
| more visible so that they can get community feedback about what
| results they need to improve.
| bjourne wrote:
| Unlike Google, DDG doesn't filter out StormFront and other
| similar sites (Bing also doesn't, apparenty). I think that is
| good because tech companies shouldn't impose politics on very
| basic tech like search indexes. I wonder how long it will last
| though.
| barbacoa wrote:
| There is a whole list of right wing news sites google will not
| link to without explicitly include the site name in the query.
| cianmm wrote:
| I've been on DuckDuckGo for nearly a year now and while I'm
| mostly happy, it can be a frustrating experience as somebody
| living in Ireland. When making a location specific search, often
| even including the word "Ireland" or the city I live in, I will
| get results from the UK, or the US. Bizarrely, toggling the
| "Ireland" location switcher on often makes the results worse -
| which is surprising since it will often prioritise .co.uk domains
| above .ie domains, which seems like a slam dunk for location-
| dependant searches (such as for example "buy new bike chain") out
| of Ireland with an "ireland" toggle switched on.
|
| Example: there is a mobile network named Three in both the UK and
| Ireland. With the Ireland location toggle enabled, the search
| "Three network coverage" places the Irish Three (three.ie) in
| fifth position, under four .co.uk results.
|
| I'm at the point where if I need to search something that could
| be location dependant I throw a !g onto the search term by
| default.
| potatochup wrote:
| Yeah, same here with NZ. Even with the location toggle enabled,
| if I don't append "NZ" to my query, I end up with a whole lot
| of useless results from the USA, UK, etc. I still use DDG for
| everything but the most technical queries though.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| One thing I loved about DDG, that 'forced' me to use it on
| mobile, is being able to filter by date (last week/month/year) on
| mobile. Google and Bing don't offer that simple feature in any
| way.
| ydant wrote:
| Google mobile website does for me. Steps: *
| Search * Scroll the tabs bar (All, Images, Shopping, etc)
| all the way to the rightmost entry, "Search Tools" * Tap
| "Search Tools" * A secondary menu bar with "ANY TIME \/"
| will appear. You can use that to filter by date-range.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| I see... If I open the browser and search there, it shows, if
| I use the search widget, it doesn't have the option
| lavp wrote:
| When using Google, the amount of times I ended up clicking a
| different link just because a box above decided to load that very
| moment was unthinkable. That alone was a big enough of a reason
| to switch.
| esturk wrote:
| DDG really needs to clean out their ! Shortcuts. Some of them
| simply doesn't work or out right banned like r/the_donald.
| XargonEnder wrote:
| Can you tell us more or perhaps provide a link?
| ronnier wrote:
| I'm using ddg, pihole, unbound, ublock, signal. Deleted twitter,
| Facebook. Looking to move away from google.
|
| Things just feel, cleaner this way. Still a long way to go
| Tokkemon wrote:
| Great, do you want a cookie?
| eganist wrote:
| > Great, do you want a cookie?
|
| Hey, this isn't productive. The parent comment provided a
| good opener for others to ask them their experience migrating
| away, etc, and that's the kind of discussion we often like to
| have around sharing our experiences with new or different
| tools.
| criley2 wrote:
| None of the things you mentioned are replacements for either
| Twitter or Facebooks core products.
|
| A search engine, router level ad-blocker, browser-based
| adblocker and messaging app do not replace a public
| messageboard or a pseudo-public/pseudo-private
| messageboard/events service.
|
| Actually maybe "unbound" is that because there's a bunch of
| projects with that name, so who knows.
| ronnier wrote:
| I'm not looking to replace them. Logging onto those products
| doesn't seem to make my life better. Seeing my friends rant
| about politics doesn't seem to make us closer. Having only
| politics on my mind isn't a good thing so I think I'll be
| better off with not relaxing them.
| eganist wrote:
| Unbound resolves to multiple things for me. Are you referring
| to the DNS resolver, or something else?
| ronnier wrote:
| Unbound dns resolver.
|
| https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/unbound/
| pea wrote:
| This is slightly off-topic, but I wonder why duckduckgo don't try
| and acquire a domain like ddg.com -
|
| It sounds minor but I find it a hard domain to type for trying
| out a search (when google isn't giving me what I want), whereas
| if it was ddg.com I'd probably jump to it more as an alternative.
| Maybe I am just incredibly lazy, though.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| They have ddg.gg which does your redirect
| [deleted]
| ClawsOnPaws wrote:
| You can use the domain ddg.gg
| TekMol wrote:
| They own duck.com
|
| I think most people are even lazier then you. They don't type
| domain names at all. They set their default SE to
| duckduckgo.com and then search via the url bar.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| On Chrome and Edge (I know, I know), you can just add 'ddg' as
| a custom search engine and type 'ddg' + space or tab
| boredumb wrote:
| I've been using start page for the past two years without a
| problem, but I do find myself dipping into google for maps and
| "near me" searches.
|
| That being said the biggest drawback is if my wife uses my phone
| to search for something she grumbles at me.
| analyte123 wrote:
| If DuckDuckGo / Bing ever approach the popularity level of
| Google, how will they not suffer similar pressure to manipulate
| their search results?
| [deleted]
| FalconSensei wrote:
| I think the most pressure is from advertisers, right? Se
| depends on how much they love making money
| yabones wrote:
| I've used DDG full-time for over two years now. I honestly don't
| miss Google.
|
| Every time I use !g I'm reminded just how bad it's gotten.
| Between the SEO spam and ads I find myself scrolling at least
| halfway down the page to find anything even remotely relevant. I
| can't say that DDG always has the 'best' results, but at least
| they seem appropriate to what I'm searching for.
|
| One thing I do wish DDG has is webmaster tools. I know they don't
| do their own indexing, but it would be nice to have a way to get
| performance & keyword data the way Google/Bing/Yandex etc present
| it.
| nostromo wrote:
| !g is some sort of brilliant marketing.
|
| Me: "I don't see what I expected. I'll try Google."
|
| Me two seconds later 9 out of 10 times: "Oh, Google also sucks
| for this query. Oh well."
| FalconSensei wrote:
| That is brilliant indeed. Although I don't understand why I
| would use '!g' instead of just 'g'+tab/whitespace, as that
| would use google as the browser search engine - if you
| manually added 'g' as google's keyword, or if you used google
| enough that when you type 'g' it interprets as possible
| google
| Zhyl wrote:
| It's also amazing for analytics.
|
| "What are people not finding on our engine?"
| grep -F '!g' log
| mikkom wrote:
| What you are saying is you like Bing results more than Google,
| DDG is bing with different UI.
| move-on-by wrote:
| I've been switched for several years as well. I like most not
| seeing AMP links and am always reminded how terrible Google is
| when someone shares a link with me and its just a big ugly
| google AMP mangled URL.
| mrlala wrote:
| To everyone saying they want to completely move away from
| google.. To me one of the biggest things is the convenience of
| random sites that I can create an account with one click linked
| to my google account.
|
| People seem to really really underestimate the power of that.
|
| Like during this last year of craziness, my kids both have google
| accounts on chrome so when we find new random websites for
| learning that I want them to have accounts with, they have all
| had google click to signin. I probably wouldn't have even
| bothered with various places if they didn't have that. For my
| kids being able to visit 5+ sites regularly and the worst that
| happens is they have to re-login by clicking 'login with google'
| cannot be understated.
| unglaublich wrote:
| using DDG full-time now for a year. results are quite relevant.
| better than the crap Google shows you these days. only
| localization remains an issue. DDG would return shops,
| restaurants etc on the other side of the world whereas Google
| would return those within a few miles. I know that comes with a
| price...
| bfrog wrote:
| When google's search fails to find the most basic of things
| because it's all Ads, is it any surprise?
|
| At what point did google search go from that great search engine
| to what amounts to an ad landing page full of spam. Sundar keeps
| trying to go into other markets rather than weeding the garden
| already sown, and its not going to end well.
| jjordan wrote:
| I think and hope that this is just the beginning. We desperately
| need tech diversity in all sorts of verticals, and search and
| social media are at the top of the list, with
| AWS/Azure/GoogleCloud closely following. Jason Calacanis is
| saying as much today:
| https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1349482476612141056
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| FWIW, we have witnessed a noticeable increase in ddg derived
| traffic across all properties.
| randomstring wrote:
| Wait, you're getting referrer strings with DDG in them? How is
| that private?
| anderber wrote:
| Can't every site know what page it came from by using the
| document history?
| sparkling wrote:
| I am on my third attempt of forcing myself to use DDG. Been back
| on DDG-only now for about 2 weeks and all i can say is that it
| still has a long way to go to be a viable alternative to Google.
| In my experience, even Bing provides significantly better
| results.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Something I'd like to know as a user is how I can help improve
| search results on DDG
| quantumofalpha wrote:
| Use Bing every now and then, the underlying web search engine
| of DDG. They will track your clicks, unlike DDG, but those
| clicks are vital for training their ranking system.
| peterpost2 wrote:
| I switched back to google after using DDG for about half a year,
| DDG results are nice, but if you mix searches between different
| language you need to manually set the country for which you are
| searching, google does this automatically.
| randomstring wrote:
| I would estimate that greater than 90% of that traffic is bot
| traffic. Having run two web search engines in the past:
| search.netscape.com (pre-google) and blekko.com. Robots accounted
| for > 80% of traffic at Netscape (around 3M searches/day in 2000
| IIRC) and definitely more than 80% at blekko. Maybe 90% or more.
| Some traffic is obviously bot traffic (single source IP, common
| patterns, obvious bot useragents) and then there's the non-
| obvious bot traffic that is random-ish, but in aggregate is
| clearly bot traffic. For instance, way too many queries matching
| the pattern "(mortgage|home loans) (zip|county|city|state)" even
| if they are coming from random IPs and user agents.
|
| At blekko, under high traffic, we would loadshed obvious bot
| traffic first and prioritize searches from humans.
| rkalla wrote:
| This is a fascinating trend - how could you even launch a
| search service today where that portion of your processing time
| is going to be spent powering bots (ad agencies?) and not
| addressing human queries.
|
| Wonder what a human-centric 'search' experience will look like
| in 2025... no more search bar, pre-emptive article fetch based
| on whatever some ML algorithm decides for you?
| Merman_Mike wrote:
| This reminds me of someone saying that eventually Amazon will
| just start sending you things and charging you for them with
| no intervention on your end.
|
| It'll just happen to be what you needed at the right time.
| XargonEnder wrote:
| This is both horrifying and tantalizing
| randomstring wrote:
| Exactly. If you can accurately ignore 50% of the bot traffic
| you halve your hardware expense. The trick is doing it in
| such a way that the bots don't notice.
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